Markus, Thomas, and Walton Receive 2026 Otto Klineberg Award
Congratulations to Co-Director Hazel Markus and Faculty Affiliates Catherine Thomas and Greg Walton! Along with Patrick Premand, Thomas Bossuroy, and Soumaila Abdoulaye Sambo, they received the 2026 Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).
The award recognizes their paper, "How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Can Help Reduce Poverty," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), for being the best article of the year on intercultural or international relations. Poverty includes economic, social, and psychological constraints that undermine people’s agency to pursue new opportunities and shape their life outcomes. The team asked: How can interventions best support the agency of low-income individuals and, in so doing, boost poverty-reduction efforts? Across experimental and field studies in the Global South, they found that agency interventions are effective when designed to be “culturally wise” - attuned to the model of agency predominant in a cultural context.
In resource-constrained rural Niger, for instance, a field experiment showed that an intervention emphasizing this relational agency (prevalent in the Global South) significantly improved women’s economic outcomes compared to control, while a prototypical intervention emphasizing personal agency (common in Western contexts) did not. Their paper offers a blueprint for considering cultural variation in agency and the promise of doing so to help reduce global poverty across diverse cultural contexts.
Read more here: How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Can Help Reduce Poverty
