Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real-world work groups have heretofore been unquantified and research has been Western-centric. We test the hypothesis that participatory group structure increases productivity for blue-collar workers in a context where participation is not a normative default. We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment with 65 Chinese factory groups (1752 workers). Half of the groups were randomly assigned to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for 6 weeks, in which the group's supervisor stepped aside and workers contributed ideas and personal goals in an open discussion of their work. The other half continued with status-quo meetings in which supervisors spoke and set goals, workers listened, and a researcher observed. We found that a participatory versus a hierarchical structure led to a 10.6% average increase in individual treatment workers’ productivity, an increase that endured for 9 weeks after the experiment ended. The brief participatory meetings also increased treatment workers’ retention rate (an 85% vs. 77% retention rate in treatment vs. control groups) and feelings of empowerment such as job satisfaction and sense of control. We found no evidence of informational gains or new worker goals; instead, evidence suggests that the increase in frequency of workers’ voicing opinions may have driven higher productivity. These findings provide rare causal evidence in a setting where participation is not a normative default, indicating the benefits of direct group participation for changing and sustaining behavior and attitudes.

Generalized attitudes toward authority and justice are often conceptualized as individual differences that are resistant to enduring change. However, across two field experiments with Chinese factory workers and American university staff, small adjustments to people’s experience of participation in the workplace shifted these attitudes one month later. Both experiments randomly assigned work groups to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for six weeks, in which the supervisor stepped aside and workers discussed problems, ideas, and goals regarding their work (vs. a status quo meeting). Across 97 work groups and 1,924 workers, participatory meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and to be more willing to participate in political, social, and familial decision-making. These findings provide rare experimental evidence of the theoretical predictions regarding participatory democracy: that local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and empowerment.

Individuals have the tendency to discount rewards in the future, known as temporal discounting, and we find that sense of power (the felt capacity to influence the thinking and behavior of others) reduces such tendency. In Studies 1 and 2, we used both an experiment and a survey with organizational employees to demonstrate that power reduced temporal discounting. In Study 3, we replicated study 1 while exploring a unique cultural trait of Danbo, or indifference to fame and wealth, across two ethnic groups (Han and Tibetan groups) in China. While power reduces temporal discounting, the relationship between the two may be leveraged by individual differences of optimism, frustration, and Danbo. The results imply a more nuanced interpretation of how individual and situational factors can affect intertemporal choice.

We studied how gendered beliefs about intellectual abilities transmit through peers and differentially impact girls’ academic performance relative to boys’. Study 1 ( N = 8,029; 208 classrooms) exploited randomly assigned variation in the proportion of a child’s middle school classmates who believe that boys are innately better than girls at learning math. An increase in exposure to peers who report this belief generated losses for girls and gains for boys in math performance. This peer exposure also increased children’s likelihood of believing the gender–math stereotype, increased the perceived difficulty of math, and reduced aspirations among girls. Study 2 ( N = 547) provided proof of concept that activating a gender–math performance gap among college students reduces women’s math performance but not verbal performance. Men’s task performance was not affected. Our findings highlight how the prevalence of stereotypical beliefs in one’s ambient and peer environment, even when readily contradictable, can shape children’s beliefs and academic ability.