Tell stories about struggle. One way that groups cohere is through storytelling. But the stories your group tells should not only be tales of triumph. Stories of failure and vulnerability also foster a sense of belongingness. For instance, Gregory Walton of Stanford University has found that for individuals who might feel apart from a group—for instance, women in a predominantly male environment or students of color in a largely white university—these types of stories can be powerful.2 Simply reading an account of another student whose freshman year didn’t go perfectly but who eventually found
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