Greg Walton, Ph.D.

Greg Walton, Ph.D. is the Michael Forman University Fellow and Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Dweck-Walton Lab at Stanford University. His latest book is 2025’s Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts.

Much of Walton’s research investigates psychological processes that contribute to major social problems and how “wise” psychological interventions that target these processes can address such problems and help people flourish, even over long periods of time. Often, these interventions are conducted in education contexts, with both students and educators, and serve to improve patterns of interaction and support students’ sense of belonging in school. In doing so, these interventions can raise students’ grades, reduce conflict (e.g., disciplinary citations, suspension rates), and promote progress through college. Because the psychological and relational patterns these interventions target are rooted in inequality, often these exercises function to reduce inequality in school success. Other interventions aim to sideline intergroup biases to promote more prosocial patterns of interaction, to promote sustainability, to strengthen close relationships, and to improve civic behavior.

In all these cases, Walton focuses on fundamental ways in which people make sense of themselves, other people, and social situations; how meanings people draw can be counterproductive and self-reinforcing (e.g., “People like me don’t belong here”); and how they can be altered to cause lasting benefits to individuals and to society.

Walton’s research has been covered in major media outlets including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Los Angeles Times.

He has received awards from numerous organizations and was identified as a “Rising Star” by the American Psychological Society in 2011; selected for the Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in 2022; and received the Cialdini Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2017 and 2022.

Walton’s research has been supported by many foundations and organizations, including the National Institute of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and Character Lab.

Walton earned his A.B. in philosophy from Stanford in 2000 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 2005. After graduate school, he worked for a year as a fellow in the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo before joining the Stanford faculty in 2008.