Research Areas

My goal is to use motivation psychology to help members of disadvantaged groups such as refugees or first-generation college students successfully pursue their goals in life. On the one side, my work aims to help us better understand the systematic barriers individuals face based on their social identities. On the other side, I develop and test solutions. For example, based on my finding that disadvantaged groups are often stigmatized as weak and powerless victims, I have developed an intervention that highlights individuals’ strengths – highlighting, for example, how refugees have shown a lot of strength and perseverance through their experiences as refugees. This identity-reframing intervention has shown to be effective, for example, boosting refugee students’’ long-term learning engagement and course completion at university.

Curriculum Vitae

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Key Publications

Bauer, C. A., Boemelburg, R., & Walton, G. M. (2021). Resourceful Actors, Not Weak Victims: Reframing Refugees’ Stigmatized Identity Enhances Long-Term Academic Engagement. Psychological Science, 32(12), 1896–1906. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028978

Bauer, C.A. & Hannover, B. (2020). Changing “us” and hostility towards “them”—Implicit theories of national identity determine prejudice and participation rates in an anti‐immigrant petition. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(4), 810–826. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2666

Bauer, C. A., Job, V., & Hannover, B. (2023). Who gets to see themselves as talented? Biased self-concepts contribute to first-generation students' disadvantage in talent-focused environments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 108, 104501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104501