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The Belief That Leadership Isn’t Just for Certain People Helped Some Teens See Themselves as Leaders
In A Nutshell
- A workshop that challenged the idea of “born leaders” was linked to a stronger sense of belonging in leadership among some teens, though the study cannot prove the workshop caused the shift.
- The benefit showed up mainly among teens who also pictured leadership as open to people of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, based on a drawing exercise.
- Researchers studied 413 middle and high school students across two sessions, 96% of whom identified with a racial or ethnic group other than White.
- The workshops mixed brain science, real-life role models, and hands-on activities like origami and juggling to challenge the belief that leadership ability is fixed at birth.
Most teenagers have heard some version of the phrase “born leader.” It shows up in yearbook superlatives, coaching pep talks, and praise handed to the student who always raises a hand first. But that phrase carries a second, quieter message: that leadership belongs to a select few, and everyone else should stand back. For many teens from historically excluded communities, both messages together can work like a locked door.
A new study published in Self and Identity found that a short workshop could challenge both beliefs at once, at least for some teens. Researchers ran two studies with 413 middle and high school students, 96% of whom identified with a racial or ethnic group other than White, through 90-minute to two-hour sessions built around the idea that leadership can be learned rather than inherited. When students let go of the “born leader” belief, many also felt a stronger pull toward seeing themselves as leaders. But the boost wasn’t universal, and who benefited came down to something specific: whether a teen also pictured leadership as open to people of many different backgrounds.
Leadership programs for young people in America remain unequal. The researchers point to outside reports showing White youth make up a greater membership share than population figures would predict at over half the sites of one prominent national leadership group, while in another major program, Asian youth membership was roughly a fifth of what it should be. Gaps like these shape what teenagers believe about who gets to lead.
Workshops Paired Brain Science With Stories of Real Leaders
Researchers partnered with summer programs serving historically underrepresented adolescents in a major metropolitan area. A team of mostly undergraduate facilitators, women, non-binary people, and people from Middle Eastern, Hispanic, East Asian, and Black backgrounds, led the sessions, modeling that leadership looks like many different things.
Students watched a video comparing the brain to a muscle: a bicep grows when challenged, and the brain builds connections the same way. Another activity paired photos on a screen, a stock image of a stereotypical-looking professional next to a real leader from a historically excluded group. Students guessed which was which, then heard the real story, including one neuroscientist who began as a migrant farm worker and rose to chair a department at a major medical institution.
Students also folded an origami fish, framed as proof that focused listening can be learned through practice. Then came juggling, a skill most had never tried. Students improved quickly and were shown research that juggling changed brain structure over time. The message: effort changes ability, leadership included.
Belonging Rose Most Among Teens With Inclusive Views of Leaders
In the first study, 67 students aged 13 to 18 took part in a single workshop. More than half reported letting go of some fixed beliefs about leadership, while less than a fifth reported holding onto them more tightly. Belonging didn’t budge much for the group as a whole, but person by person, the pattern was clear: teens who shed more of the “born leader” mindset also felt more like leaders themselves, even accounting for mood.
A second, larger study with 346 students from six programs added a twist. New activities pushed back on the image of a leader as a White man in a suit. Students grabbed markers and pens and drew over stock images that cast White men as the face of leadership, reworking them into something that felt truer. At the end, students received crayons, including a range of skin-tone shades, and drew a leader’s face. A separate group of 318 adults, who knew nothing about the study, rated how much racial and ethnic diversity each drawing seemed to reflect.
That drawing turned out to matter more than anything else. Among teens whose drawings scored higher on diversity, those who also let go of more fixed beliefs felt the strongest boost in belonging. Among teens whose drawings scored lower on diversity, shedding fixed beliefs barely moved the needle. One likely explanation, though untested: a wider mental picture of who can lead may make it easier to see room in that picture at all. The ratings measured general diversity, not whether a drawing matched any teen’s own race or ethnicity.
Without a Comparison Group, Cause Remains Unproven
Every teen in the study got the workshop. Researchers chose not to hold a comparison group back, since withholding a program that might help teens in underserved communities raised its own ethical concerns. That means the study can’t prove the workshop caused these shifts, only that they showed up together. It also couldn’t track whether the changes lasted. Researchers sent students home with silicone bracelets stamped “Be a Leader,” and some team members later spotted a few kids still wearing them months on, though there was no formal way to check.
Adolescence is when young people are still deciding who they might become. The takeaway isn’t that talking teens out of “born leader” thinking is enough on its own. It seems to work best paired with a wider mental picture of who gets to lead, though that pairing showed up more clearly on one measure of belonging than another. What it offers is a strong hint that belief and imagery may need to shift together.
Paper Notes
Limitations
The authors note several important limitations. Most significantly, neither study used a control group, a group of students who did not receive the workshop, which means the findings cannot conclusively establish that the workshop caused changes in fixed beliefs or sense of belonging. The researchers made this choice intentionally, citing ethical guidelines that caution against withholding potentially beneficial programs from vulnerable adolescents, and noting that the schools and programs involved were unwilling to support a no-treatment group. The authors conducted statistical checks to reduce the chance that the changes observed were simply due to random fluctuation or the tendency of extreme scores to drift toward average over time, and found no evidence that those factors explained their results.
In Study 2, the effect of diverse mental representations was statistically significant when belonging was measured using a visual, picture-based tool, but the pattern was weaker and did not reach statistical significance when measured using a written scale. The inclusiveness ratings reflected how strongly independent adult raters perceived each drawing as depicting people from multiple racial or ethnic groups; they did not assess whether a drawing matched any individual participant’s own race, ethnicity, or gender. Additionally, drawings used to measure students’ mental pictures of leaders were collected only after the workshop, not before, which means researchers could not fully separate students’ pre-existing views from whatever the workshop may have changed. The studies also could not track long-term effects, as researchers had access to participants for only a single session. Effect sizes observed were modest, though the authors note this is typical for real-world interventions with adolescent populations.
Funding and Disclosures
The authors reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article. No potential conflicts of interest were reported.
Publication Details
Authors: Nallely De La Rosa, Jordan S. Daley, and Emily Balcetis, all affiliated with the Department of Psychology at New York University, New York, NY. | Paper title: “Challenging fixed mindsets fosters belonging in leadership among adolescents from historically excluded groups” | Journal: Self and Identity (ISSN: 1529-8868 print; 1529-8876 online), published by Taylor & Francis Group / Informa UK Limited. | Published online: July 14, 2026 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2026.2682150 | Study protocols were reviewed and approved by the New York University Institutional Review Board [FY2019-2929]. The study was not pre-registered. All data, analysis code, survey materials, and workshop materials are publicly available at: https://osf.io/gh5fv/?view_only=f69798b403e740249026a0f0c772927a
