The Science of I-House: A Conversation with Jay Van Bavel, PhD
Generations of alumni will tell you that being at I-House is a life-changing experience. Now, there’s data to prove it.
In late October, the International House Board of Trustees gathered for its biannual board meeting in the Dodge Room. Beyond the usual business of budgetary review and year-end reports, the group also welcomed an unusual trio of guests: A team of social scientists, eager to share their findings about the I-House experience.
The team was led by Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Van Bavel has authored more than 100 academic publications, and he has spent his career studying how group identities, moral values, and political beliefs shape the mind, brain, and behavior. With their latest study, his team set out to answer a simple question: What’s the real impact of I-House, and can it really change you for the better?
To find out, they conducted a year-long study of more than 450 I-House residents representing 81 countries from around the world. When the results were parsed, they illustrated a simple truth: By nearly every measure, I-House is truly life-changing.
“I’ve probably run a thousand studies in my life and been in collaborations on many more, and the data from I-House really stands out,” Van Bavel says. “It’s one of the most positive studies I’ve seen.”
We sat down with Jay to discuss the team’s findings and unpack what science can teach us about the real impact of I-House.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about this study. What was the impetus and why is it a valuable exercise for a place like I-House?
I-House reached out to us about three to four years ago on a recommendation from a colleague of mine. They had heard all of these stories over the years about how I-House had this transformative, positive effect on the lives of residents.
In 2023, we started by surveying 50 years of I-House alumni to see if they had positive experiences. We also measured how they rated on a number of pro-social traits, things like empathy, emotional intelligence, and intellectual humility. That first survey gave us overwhelming evidence that people had a positive experience at I-House, and they scored higher on almost every single pro-social trait we measured versus other populations. If I-House was a country, they would have ranked as one of the top countries around the world in terms of pro-sociality.
But of course, that’s just correlational data. It might be that a place like I-House just attracts the most pro-social people. We wanted to get more evidence of a causal transformative effect. And that’s what we did in 2024-25: a longitudinal study to see how residents changed from the moment they entered I-House to the moment they left.
There were some really exciting takeaways highlighted in the report, but were there things about the data that really stood out or surprised your team?
When we got the data after the first wave, when I-House had just admitted these residents, I met with Sebastian and the I-House staff and said, “These people score so highly from the moment you admit them, be prepared for there to be no improvement, because they are already so close to the ceiling on these measures.”
I thought maybe I-House just has this most amazing admission process for attracting and selecting the most pro-social people. So I kind of braced myself for that finding. But what was surprising to me is once we got the wave two data, there was improvement across the board on measure after measure. And we saw the most growth among people who weren’t at the top of the charts on these measures initially.
In other words, the people who had the most potential to grow were the ones who were most impacted and changed in positive ways by their experience.
What does that tell us about I-House?
It’s really positive. Because it suggests that, first of all, I-House attracts the type of people who are very pro-social and care about helping others, people who are open-minded and are not hyper-polarized. But also, if you drop other people into that environment, it changes them in a positive way over and over again on all kinds of measures.
It really suggests that not only does I-House attract and admit these types of pro-social people, but they then create a culture that is transformative for others who come into it.
What are these pro-social traits, and how does I-House measure up against other groups?
This is a global measure of pro-sociality that is administered for about 190 countries around the world. Again, it measures things like empathy, emotional intelligence, and intellectual humility. Researchers have been tracking this data over years and years and years. With our data, we were able to find how I-House residents scored on these measures, and they scored near the top of the world.
That was one of the most interesting data points to me, because first of all, you have a really robust sample. You can reference a well-established validated measure, and you can really see where I-House ranks in an objective, quantitative way relative to other places. And residents improved further on these measures over the course of the year. So they rank highly, in part, because the special sauce of I-House seems to be helping people grow in a pro-social way.
“If I-House was a country, they would have ranked as one of the top countries around the world in terms of pro-sociality.”
Were you surprised to see this kind of growth given the external environment in the U.S. right now? Especially given the level of political polarization.
It is quite remarkable to see growth under those circumstances, especially considering the stress and chaos that we’ve had in the last year, and especially when you think in the context of immigrants living in New York.
I study polarization in the United States. I can tell you it is in its most polarized period since we’ve been tracking it, so at least the last 40-45 years. And it’s getting worse and worse.
We wanted to track that among this population and what we found, if anything, was that I-House seemed to be a buffer against increases of polarization. It seems to be like a protective factor, almost like you’d get a vaccine to avoid catching a virus. I-House seems to have that inoculation property for the people who are living there.
What are some possible takeaways for other organizations who are trying to create this kind of environment?
Dominic and I both work at universities, and we’re immersed in this national debate about whether colleges are fostering conflict and creating spaces that are making students uncomfortable with disagreement. That’s one of the main critiques of universities, that they’re no longer doing that.
What we find at I-House is, if anything, all the opposite of those critiques. I-House is making people more open to different perspectives, less hostile to people who disagree with them, and more comfortable having debate with people who they might not agree with. And we’re not just talking about politics. We’re talking about religion, nationality; we’re talking about major differences. I think this is, in essence, what I always imagined that universities were supposed to do.
And so I-House really seems to have found, in my view, the recipe that we should all hope that other academic institutions would be able to identify and adopt to recreate the culture that they’re supposed to represent.
What do you think that recipe is?
When we went to I-House, it really did seem like they had the right vision for a long time about how this operates, which is that you put a bunch of people from different backgrounds in a common context that’s safe for them to discuss differences, not to go their separate ways and avoid discussing differences.
And when we talked to people and we collected the data, a lot of the benefits I talked about were just happening over dinner. Breaking bread with someone or just talking in the hallways with someone who’s different than you are really profound ways to have these discussions. Of course, I-House also has a lot of programming specifically designed to expose people to different perspectives and get them talking about it.
75 years of research backs up that those are the things you should do. And so I think that’s the recipe. It’s not that I-House invented it, it’s just that almost no one has implemented it this well.
What did you hear from alumni and residents in their testimonials?
The qualitative evidence was overwhelmingly positive. We’re measuring these data quantitatively, but people can also describe rich experiences and examples of things that really changed how they saw the world.
With alumni, some of them were talking about experiences they had at I-House 20, 30 years ago. Experiences that changed how they operated in the world, how they became a leader, how they dealt with difference, or how they managed teams or huge organizations.
So when we met with the trustees, our message was that I-House really does seem to have not just a recipe for creating a culture that I would like to see on more university campuses, but it seems to have a long track record of generating these really global leaders. People who can transcend differences, who can move around the world, who can understand people who are different than them. These are people who can find common ground, have healthy disagreements, and then grow from them.
I’ve probably run a thousand studies in my life and been in collaborations on many more, and the data from I-House really stands out. It’s one of the most positive studies I’ve seen.
What can I-House do with this data? What are some practical applications?
I think of two practical applications. One thing is making sure people are in person, because it’s hard to have disagreements online. I do a lot of research on social media and how polarization happens there, and it’s just the most extreme people who dominate the conversation. It’s very alienating, and it doesn’t really bridge any differences.
So I think having those in-person conversations where you can really see somebody who’s different, really hear them and understand them, is important. You either find common ground, or else find new perspective on why you might disagree with someone. That opens your eyes and allows you to see that their perspective actually might be valid.
The other thing we found in the data was that it wasn’t just one type of event or one type of interaction at I-House that really made the change. People who were more engaged benefited most. The more they did at I-House, the more beneficial change we found on average. It was from doing all kinds of different things, dinners and programs and events.
That’s why I think the biggest lesson is to increase immersion, and you’ll probably increase the positive effects. You don’t have to change what you’re doing. You just have to get more and more people to do those things and do them more frequently, and you’ll have a bigger bang for your buck.
“[Having] those in-person conversations where you can really see somebody who’s different, really hear them and understand them, is important. You either find common ground, or else find new perspective on why you might disagree with someone. That opens your eyes and allows you to see that their perspective actually might be valid.”
Closing thoughts?
As we were analyzing the data and preparing our report, we were thinking a lot about the concept of psychological safety. There’s a lot of research on this, and it’s what makes organizations and teams work better.
What psychological safety means is not that no one can disagree, or that we all go into our own little rooms and shut the door so no one can upset us. It’s the opposite. It’s about everybody having a voice. Everybody can disagree and no one gets offended. Or at least if you disagree or you are offended, you’re welcome back to lunch the next day and treated with respect and dignity. It means that people from the most diverse backgrounds often get a voice in those types of cultures that they don’t otherwise get in other organizations or teams.
What I think that I-House has done is they’ve created a psychologically safe space for everybody to be part of the conversation. It’s a space where people can be comfortable hearing different opinions and therefore be comfortable sharing different opinions. That’s the thing that I think most universities and most organizations are lacking. They’re all trying to improve it now that study after study has shown it predicts team performance and happiness and belonging, but it’s a hard thing to create.
That is, in my view, the overarching story of I-House. They have been doing this for 100 years. The concept of psychological safety is really only a couple of decades old, but I think I-House was probably there first.
Interested in learning more? Read the study and the team’s newsletter, The Power of Us.
Jay Van Bavel is a Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, an affiliate at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations, and Director of the Social Identity & Morality Lab. He is the co-author of “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. Jay has published over 100 academic publications and co-authors a mentoring column, called Letters to Young Scientists, for Science Magazine. He has written about his research for the New York Times, BBC, Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and the Washington Post and his work has appeared in academic papers as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court and Senate. His research was also featured in TEDx and TED-Ed videos and he has consulted with the White House, United Nations, European Union, and World Health Organization on issues related to his research. Follow Dr. Van Bavel online.