Nilanjana Dasgupta’s First Book, ‘Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities,’ Now Available

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Offering a science-driven approach to achieving social change, a newly-published debut book by Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, provost professor of psychological and brain sciences in the College of Natural Sciences, argues that small changes to the “wallpaper” – the local cultures around us – are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts or relying solely on good intentions.

In “Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities,” published Jan. 7 by Yale University Press, Dasgupta reveals how to nudge local cultures toward positive structural change by moving people from individual action to collective action.

By integrating knowledge across diverse fields – including psychology, neuroscience, education, sociology, economics, public health, urban studies, cultural geography, and landscape architecture – Dasgupta shows how attitudes and beliefs take root in our mind based on what we see and hear every day. This wallpaper nudges our behavior to create or reinforce small inequalities that go unnoticed and accumulate over time. Disrupting these patterns and habits requires creating opportunities for social mixing across lines of difference, listening to people’s personal stories, becoming aware of inequalities embedded in these stories, growing solidarity, openness to organizing and collective action for positive change.

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Together, these types of experiences and actions bring real change within our reach – in workplaces, in neighborhoods, in cities and towns, says Dasgupta, who also serves as director of the UMass Institute of Diversity Sciences.

“’Change the Wallpaper’ provides the best reporting to date of research that forces us to move our attention away from ‘the individual’ and towards situations and environments as the drivers of change,” says Mahzarin R. Banaji, coauthor of “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.” “As such, it offers up an old truth from the social sciences, but with the strength of evidence from today’s laboratories and organizations. Read it and you’ll want to change your wallpaper.”

Laurie Santos, Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast says the book is “a provocative, enlightening read” and “an indispensable guide for anyone ready for the challenge of fixing our unfair world.”

Dasgupta will participate in a conversation about the book with professor, lawyer and activist Carrie Baker, from 6:30-7:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 18 in the Coolidge Museum at Forbes Library in Northampton. Dasgupta and Baker will discuss how the power of situations helps maintain the status quo and how individuals acting together is essential to dismantling it piece-by-piece. Books will be available for purchase at the event via Broadside Books.

More information about the “Change the Wallpaper” can be found at https://changethewallpaper.com/book/. For more information about the Feb. 18 event, visit the Forbes Library website.