Nilanjana Dasgupta, provost professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded the 2026 Book Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for her book Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities (Yale University Press, 2025). The annual prize celebrates a book written by a psychologist that makes a distinctive and important contribution to the field by promoting an understanding of the science of social and personality psychology to the public.
In Change the Wallpaper, Dr. Dasgupta examines how the local spaces we live in nudge everyday beliefs and behavior to create small changes in individuals and their relationships that often go unnoticed. Drawing from stories as well as foundations in psychology, neuroscience, economics, public health, urban studies, cultural geography, and landscape architecture, Dr. Dasgupta offers a roadmap for everyday people and organizational leaders to notice the “wallpaper” of their culture and take actionable steps to create real change.
At UMass Amherst, Dr. Dasgupta is founding director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences and principal investigator of the Implicit Social Cognition Lab, where she studies the ways in which changes in social contexts correspondingly change implicit attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Her current research identifies the types of academic and professional contexts that protect individuals’ sense of self and aspirations against negative stereotypes.
Dr. Dasgupta is a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she majored in psychology and minored in neuroscience. She earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Yale University. After conducting postdoctoral research with the University of Washington and teaching at the New School for Social Research, Dr. Dasgupta joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 2003. She was granted the title of provost professor in 2022.