Thursday, July 16, 2026

How do we produce more future leaders for the nation? Change how young people think about leadership

New research shows how to help young people believe they can lead

New York University

Americans are dissatisfied with the state of leadership in the United States across several sectors—business, education, government, and healthcare—a Harris poll showed last year. The survey raised a foundational question about developing the next generation of leaders: How can today’s young people be encouraged to become CEOs, principals, directors, and even presidents?

A pair of studies by a team of New York University psychology researchers offers a means to expand the pool of tomorrow’s leaders.

These studies with racially diverse teens showed the following: When they were taught that leadership is not an innate trait reserved for a select few and when they were encouraged to imagine people in leadership that they might not have considered before, they became significantly more likely to see themselves as belonging in leadership roles.

“The next generation of leaders is shaped not only by who gets opportunities, but by who young people believe leadership is for,” says Emily Balcetis, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Self and Identity. “This research suggests that helping adolescents reject the idea that leadership is a quality some people are born with and others not—and by expanding who they imagine can be a leader—may strengthen ambition among youth to become future leaders.”

How teens view leaders—and themselves

Recognizing existing demographic-based disparities in leadership across government, healthcare, and other fields, the NYU research team conducted two studies—involving more than 400 primarily non-White American teens in workshop settings—designed to both understand and overcome perceived barriers to leadership.

Study One

The NYU research team, which included Nallely De La Rosa and Jordan Daley*, asked the participants a series of questions about their views of leadership as it pertained to them personally (e.g., “I feel that I belong as a leader”) and whether or not leadership skills are fixed or innate (e.g., “Your leadership ability is something about you that you can’t change very much”).

The participants, which included non-White 8th grade and high school students, then attended a series of learning modules—all of which conveyed that leadership ability grows through effort, strategy, and learning—in a two-hour workshop. The modules included scientific videos about brain development, real-world examples of young people from a variety of backgrounds in leadership, and skill-building exercises. The activities guided students away from the belief that qualities are innate and toward the understanding that abilities can be developed with supported, well-directed effort—consistent with previous research on leadership development.

After these activities and learning sessions, the participants were surveyed again. Overall, teens who came to see leadership as less of an innate, fixed trait after the workshop were also the ones who showed a stronger sense of belonging in leadership—for example, they were more likely to respond affirmatively to questions such as “I feel that I belong as a leader.”

Study Two

In a study of a new and larger set of teens from the same demographic groups, the researchers focused on the participants’ mental representations of successful leaders. In other words, who comes to mind when they think of such leaders? Previous research has shown that beliefs about personal belonging in leadership are shaped in part by one’s mental representations of leaders—or, put differently, if those you see as leaders also look like you, you’re more likely to see yourself as a potential leader, too.

As with the first study, the participants were surveyed about their views of leadership and took part in a similar workshop. However, in the second study the researchers added an element designed to better understand—and address—the impact of the teens’ mental representations of leaders.

To measure these mental representations, the participants were asked to draw pictures of what they thought leaders looked like. These pictures were rated by an independent panel of adults that determined whether or not the artist was trying to depict people from multiple racial or ethnic groups as it applied to each drawing. As with the first study, the participants, after partaking in the workshop and the drawing exercise, were surveyed again about their perceptions of their own leadership potential.

Overall, the teens who reported weaker beliefs that leadership was innate after the workshop and who held mental representations of leadership that were broad—they drew pictures of leaders who were not only White and male—were more likely to show increases in feelings of personal belonging in leadership. These results suggest the impact of mental representations of leadership on one’s views of their own leadership potential.

“By showing that adolescents’ sense of leadership belonging can shift when we support their beliefs they can grow needed skills to lead and we help them adopt more inclusive mental representations of leaders, the research offers a potential means for expanding future leadership opportunities across professions,” concludes Balcetis.

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*Editor’s note: Jordan Daley will be a member of the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Loyola University of Chicago beginning in August 2026.

Journal

Self and Identity

DOI

10.1080/15298868.2026.2682150

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Challenging fixed mindsets fosters belonging in leadership among adolescents from historically excluded groups

Article Publication Date

14-Jul-2026

Deep-sea creatures’ epic migrations between hydrothermal vents

Combined migration and biochemical data reveal the stories of tiny creatures’ surprising journeys in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Tokyo

Shinkailepas at different life stages. — image:
(Left) A vent-dwelling limpet retaining its brown larval shell. (Right) A swimming larva with two earlike structures called velum. ©2026 Yahagi et al. CC-BY-ND
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Credit: ©2026 Yahagi et al. CC-BY-ND

Hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean host a broad range of rare and unusual ecosystems. They can be spread very far apart, and yet there will often be overlap in the creatures which inhabit them. Researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, answer a long-standing question in this field about how creatures migrate between hydrothermal vents. Their process involves inspecting the chemical nature of limpet shells to reconstruct their likely journeys, yielding some surprising results.

People in Japan and around the world often enjoy a nice soak in natural hot springs, pools of water heated by underground geothermal processes. But did you know similar activity drives another kind of hot spring under the sea, hydrothermal vents? Although you probably wouldn’t appreciate a dip in one of these; if the freezing cold water surrounding them doesn’t kill you, the boiling hot water coming out of them certainly would, and there’s also the bone-crushing pressure thousands of meters down to contend with. Some lucky people do visit these, but they stay in the comfort of a pressurized deep-sea submersible. Incredibly though, these hostile environments can be teeming with life — fish, crustaceans, gastropods and more.

These ecosystems, in contrast to every one that exists up here on the surface, do not depend on the sun for their primary source of energy; it’s all chemical. And, even though vents, or collections of vents, can be hundreds of kilometers apart, there may be present a lot of identical or closely related creatures around them. This raises a question, though: How do creatures, some of which are not free swimmers and can be incredibly tiny, migrate between these sites? Such a question is not trivial, as knowing can improve our understanding of evolution, biodiversity, and how human activity can have knock-on effects on ecosystems. Assistant Professor Takuya Yahagi and Associate Professor Yasunori Kano from the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, and their team, set out to answer questions about migrating vent-dwelling creatures.

“Our previous studies, including larval culture experiments and population genetic analyses, suggested that plankton-feeding larvae of hydrothermal vent animals disperse in surface waters, where they can feed on phytoplankton and be transported by strong currents over long distances. However, directly observing or tracking these microscopic larvae in the open ocean is extremely difficult,” said Yahagi. “We collected animals from vents in the west Pacific using research vessels. The limpets we analyzed still retained their tiny larval shells. Like growth rings in a tree, these shells preserve chemical clues about the environment in which they grew. By measuring chemical signatures recorded in the larval shells, we estimated the temperatures of environments they probably lived in and reconstructed their early life histories.”

The researchers found that limpets collected from hydrothermal vents had explored the sunlit upper ocean during their larval stage, based on chemical signatures preserved in their shells. This discovery helps explain how animals living at isolated vent sites can spread over hundreds or thousands of kilometers. It also shows that conditions in surface waters, such as currents, temperature, and food availability, may play an important role in shaping deep-sea vent ecosystems. The team previously proposed that newly hatched larvae swim upward and disperse near the ocean's surface. In this study, they showed that every limpet from deep-sea hydrothermal vents that they analyzed had undertaken this journey before either settling back to its birthplace or establishing itself at a new vent site.

“There were two major challenges, though,” said Yahagi. “The first was finding suitable specimens. We needed animals that had retained tiny larval shells, and such specimens are not commonly collected from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Fortunately, Professor Kano obtained suitable specimens during research cruises. The second challenge was analyzing the larval shells themselves. These shells are less than 1 millimeter in size and only about 10 micrometers thick. We had to analyze them very carefully while avoiding contamination from shells formed after settlement. Advances in analytical technology allowed us to obtain reliable chemical records from these tiny shells.”

The larval duration remains unknown for most hydrothermal vent species, but experiments suggest at least one species may spend more than a year near the surface before settling back down. This journey is highly risky as larvae can be eaten by any number of predators or get carried away by currents, never to reach a suitable vent habitat. The researchers suspect that only a small fraction successfully completes the journey, which may even explain why many vent animals are known to produce large numbers of eggs. The high productivity of hydrothermal vents, supported by bacteria that derive energy from chemicals rather than sunlight, provides the resources needed for this strategy.

As currents are largely responsible for relocating larvae, and as those currents are influenced by temperature patterns in different regions and layers of the ocean, there is a possibility that climate change could affect larval dispersal and connectivity among vent populations, although direct evidence is still lacking. The team suggests that although larval ecology is highly species-specific, the three limpet species examined in this study may be relatively resilient due to their large numbers of offspring and capability of long-distance dispersal via surface waters. As a result, their responses to environmental change or disturbance may not be representative of other hydrothermal vent ecologies. So, comparable studies across a wider range of vent-dwelling species will be needed before the ecological impacts of activities such as deep-sea mining can be properly assessed. Understanding how different vent species recover from disturbance, and how they maintain connectivity between isolated habitats, remains an important area for future research too.

“One of our next goals is to determine how widespread this behavior is among hydrothermal vent animals. In this study, we examined species living at depths of no deeper than around 2,000 meters, but hydrothermal vents occur as deep as 5,000 meters, so we are interested in whether animals from even greater depths also migrate to the sunlit upper ocean during their larval stage,” said Kano. “We also want to reconstruct environmental temperature estimates at finer scales across different parts of the larval shell. In the present study, we obtained only a single temperature estimate for each larval shell, but higher-resolution measurements could reveal more detailed aspects of larval behavior. Although this is technically very challenging, it may allow us to trace not only the ascent to surface waters but also the return journey, including the descent into the deep sea and the search for a suitable hydrothermal vent where the larvae eventually settle, feed, reproduce and repeat the cycle again.”

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This vent was photographed at a depth of 1,920 meters, but the deepest known vents are found at almost 5,000 meters. The hydrothermal fluid was 288 degrees Celsius, but some deep vents can exhaust liquid around 400 degrees Celsius. ©2026 JAMSTEC

Credit

This was used to analyze larval shells and reconstruct the seawater environments the larvae experienced during their journey. ©2026 Yahagi et al. CC-BY-ND
Credit
©2026 Yahagi et al. CC-BY-ND

Journal:

Takuya Yahagi, Kentaro Tanaka, Tomihiko Higuchi, Kotaro Shirai, Naoto Takahata, Yuji Sano, Shigeaki Kojima, Yasunori Kano. “Gastropod shells record larval migration from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to the euphotic zone”, Science Advances, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx7045, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx7045

Funding:

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (15J08646, 18J01945, 19K15893, 22K14934, 15H04412, 18H02494, 19KK0385, 19H03028 and 22H02681).
The University of Tokyo Ocean Alliance funded by The Nippon Foundation (OAI-17-8).

Research Contact:

Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo,
5-1-5, Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa-shi, Chiba 277-8564 JAPAN
https://www.aori.u-tokyo.ac.jp/english/

About The University of Tokyo:

The University of Tokyo is Japan's leading university and one of the world's top research universities. The vast research output of some 6,000 researchers is published in the world's top journals across the arts and sciences. Our vibrant student body of around 15,000 undergraduate and 15,000 graduate students includes over 5,000 international students. Find out more at www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ or follow us on X (formerly Twitter) at @UTokyo_News_en.