Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities

Summary

A social psychologist reveals how to nudge local cultures toward positive structural change by moving people from individual action to collective action.

How can ordinary people fight for social justice? Can individual actions change structural inequality? In this book, social psychologist Nilanjana Dasgupta offers a science-driven approach to achieving social change, arguing 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.

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, allowing new relationships to form, and promoting a better understanding of unfamiliar others’ experiences, followed by organizing and collective action. Together, these types of experiences and actions bring real change within our reach—in workplaces, in neighborhoods, in cities and towns. Dasgupta provides fresh, actionable approaches for everyone interested in working toward justice for all.

Includes a PDF of additional resources