What is Our Wallpaper and How Can We Change It? Come to Nilanjana Dasgupta’s Plenary Lecture to Find Out

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Dr. Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta will be the 2025 CHC Plenary Speaker on October 9.

Dr. Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, the 2025 CHC Plenary Speaker, realized that something was wrong with the way that we as a society approach social change when she kept getting invited to teach Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion workshops.

As a social psychologist, she knows that the introduction of diversity training comes from a place of good intent—but sharing information about the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn't always have the desired result.

“Knowledge doesn’t necessarily change our behavior,” she says. For meaningful cultural shifts, “we need to stay laser-focused on changing behavior.”

If anyone knows what tactics for social change are going to work, it’s Dasgupta. She is a provost professor of psychology in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst and the director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences.

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Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta's book "Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities"

Her research on implicit bias and her understanding of the “power of the situation,” a phenomenon in social psychology that shows that our thoughts and behavior are often guided by social situations we’re in, even though we’re not always aware of it. This led her to write an entire book on the topic. Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities (published January 2025) was born out of a desire to merge science and stories to teach people of all fields how to create effective change.

Dasgupta describes the “wallpaper” mentioned in the title of her book as the surroundings that shape our perspective of the world around us—the design of our physical environment, hidden messaging we’re exposed to, popular stories we hear through word of mouth and the media, and the impact of seeing people in valued and respected roles who we can relate to versus others we don’t relate to.

“When I say change the wallpaper, I'm essentially saying our wallpaper is the immediate environment around us,” explains Dasgupta.

By changing these types of external “wallpaper,” she reasons, we can shift our internal perspectives and behavior in key ways that create change.

“If we change the wallpaper, we will change implicit bias, not just the bias in our mind, but the bias in our behavior,” she adds.

Changing the Wallpaper in Practice

In the process of writing this book, Dasgupta wanted to make sure she was living it out in her own life. One of the big concepts in Dasgupta’s book is that local and collective action make the most concrete change in the real world. So when the Northampton Public Schools received a reduction in funding, she got together with a group of parents, teachers, and neighbors to help support the kids who need it most. Instead of releasing a statement or telling her friends that she supported children in their public schools, she rolled up her sleeves to make a difference for them through her actions.

Children in Northampton’s public schools are more diverse—in terms of social class, race, and ethnicity—compared to Northampton’s general population. Many of the students in public schools have high learning needs that are not being met by local public schools because of reduced funding. Consistently reducing school funding undercuts the education of the most vulnerable kids in ways that can’t easily be reversed later on. Working on this issue collectively, with a group of parents and local citizens, has been a way for her to translate her research into tangible change.

While Dasgupta has found meaning in working to support Northampton Public Schools, she wants people to know the book isn’t just about education or psychology. Her goal in writing this book was to stitch together research from a variety of disciplines to find the “common fabric” that shows how the power of situations shapes human behavior and our lives for good or ill. By identifying the “common fabric,” she sheds light on what kind of social action actually works in the real world.

“I want the book to weave together science and stories and show how the lessons can inform our actions in ways that actually moves the needle in real life…not just be academic learning relegated to journals in a library.”

“We focus too much on trying to appeal to hearts and minds,” Dasgupta says. Instead, we should be critically interrogating what is around us, what messages we’re internalizing, and how we can “harness or neutralize” situational forces to create change in service of greater justice. We need to understand how to do this successfully. What kind of action actually makes the most difference?

To learn more about how to recognize your own “wallpaper,” find out what makes social change work most effective, and what issues to focus on, come to Commonwealth Honors College’s Plenary Lecture from 5-6 p.m. on Thursday, October 9 in the Student Union Ballroom.