The Social Perception and Intergroup Inequality lab is housed in the Psychology Department of Cornell University (PI: Amy Krosch).
We aim to understand the persistent and wide-spread inequalities that exist between groups in America. We investigate social and economic factors that amplify discrimination, and the basic social-cognitive, perceptual, and emotional processes through which the goals and motivations of decision makers influence their behavior toward members of their own and other groups.
Our lab takes a multilevel approach to research, integrating ideas and methods from experimental social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral decision-making, and psychophysics.
Through this approach, we hope to advance psychological theories of intergroup bias, address basic questions about the flexibility of social cognition and perception, and ultimately inform interventions aimed at reducing group-based disparities in socio-economic and health outcomes.
Our lab respects and values the full spectrum of human diversity in race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, body type, socio-economic background, age, disability, and national origin. We strive for inclusion and diversity in achievement and sustained excellence through our research, training, and outreach, and actively seek to promote people underrepresented in psychology. Students of color, women, first generation students, and other underrepresented folks are strongly encouraged to apply to join the lab.
Learn more about our Research and read our Papers/Press.
Lab News & Events
Upcoming events at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's Annual Convention in February! Talk by Professor Krosch - Dampened arousal to outgroup harm drives intergroup bias and poster presented by Isabella Crame - Multiracial identity flexibility under conditions of identity threat.
12/11: New paper accepted in Science Advances! with ~250 researchers around the world Addressing Climate Change with Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries. Science Advances.
9/21/23: New paper out in Psych Science! With Benedek Kurdi and Melissa Ferguson: Oppressed groups engender implicit positivity: Seven demonstrations using novel and familiar targets.
5/23/23: Prof Krosch awarded the 2023 Morgan Chia-Wen Sze and Bobbi Josephine Hernandez Distinguished Teaching Prize
5/12/23: Dr. Mikaela Spruill inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and received an award for her paper How do people come to judge what is reasonable? Effects of legal and sociological systems on human psychology
May 2023 - Congratulations DOCTOR Spruill and DOCTOR Tepper!!!
5/12/23: Kirstan Brodie received an exceptional department service award!
11/16/22: Mikaela Spruill is presenting for the Graduate Research Seminar, "Legal Inequity in Context: Theoretical and Empirical Insights into our Judgements and Decisions". Join in person or on Zoom at 12:20 PM ET.
11/16/22: Chadé Darby and Claire Malcomb speak at the Virtual Building Allyship Series (12:00 - 1:30 PM ET)! Register here.
11/01/22: Chadé's paper, Black Employees' Allyship Needs was accepted at the Rising Scholar's Conference at the University of Chicago. Check out the conference here!
9/26/22: Amy publishes new Science & Society paper Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Threat alters race perception to facilitate discrimination.
8/10/22: Amy and Kirstan won a grant! Cornell MRI Facility Pilot Award: Reward Learning as a Mechanism of Stereotype Persistence
8/05/22: Chadé Darby presented her paper Black Employees' Allyship Needs as part of the Perceiving and Disrupting Discrimination in Organizations symposium at the Academy of Management Conference in Seattle, Washington.
8/01/22: We welcome Nexus Scholars 2022 Laila Dancy and Hyacinth White-Grey to the lab! Read more about them here.
7/29/22: Amy was elected a Fellow to the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Congrats Amy!
6/20/22: Amy publishes a new paper with Michael Berkebile-Weinberg and David Amodio in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, read it here: Economic scarcity increases racial stereotyping in beliefs and face representation.
5/31/22: We welcome Laila Dancy and Hyacinth White-Grey from the Nexus Scholars Program 2022 into the lab for the Summer! Read more about Laila and Hya here!
5/27/22: Anna Hu has been selected to give the student speech at the Human Development/Psychology Departmental Ceremony! Congratulations, Anna!
5/13/22: Breanna Green and Mikaela Spuill won Graduate Diversity & Inclusion Awards! Congratulations!
4/29/22: Amy and Mikaela were invited to speak at the Inclusive Excellence Summit!
The talk, Psychological Barriers to Reparations, will be held at 9:15-10:45 A.M.
4/4/22: Kirstan Brodie wins the NSF GRFP!
3/18/22: Mikaela Spruill publishes Legal descriptions of police officers affect how citizens judge them with Dr. Neil Lewis Jr. in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology!
3/11/22: Claire Sandman successfully defends her Master's Thesis, Gender Allyship in Organizations. Congratulations, Claire!
3/3/22: Anna Hu wins the A&S Undergrad Research Program Travel Award for her presentation at SPSP 2022, see her poster here
2/17/22-2/19/22: Four of our team members presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention. Click here to learn more about Kirstan Brodie, Celia Guillard, Anna Hu, and Mikaela Spruill's presentations!
1/2022: Anna Hu won The Psychology Department Undergraduate Travel Award, and SPSP Annual Conference Diversity Undergraduate Award
12/2021: Tara Soltani graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor's of Art in B.A. in Information Science and Psychology, and is continuing work as a Research Assistant in the Krosch Lab
12/6/2021: The Krosch Lab welcomes Youssef Amin as the new lab manager
6/2021: Tara Soltani was accepted into the RISE program at Rutgers with the NJSC Grant
7/14/2020: Celia Guillard co-authored and presented Perceived victoomhood shapes support for violent political extremism at the annual meeting of The International Society for Political Psychology.
12/13/19: A new paper by Rachel King and her colleagues has been accepted in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Read it here: Counterstereotyping can change children’s thinking about boys’ and girls’ toy preferences
11/20/19: Rachel King was recently featured in a Cornell Chronicle article highlighting Cornell’s First Generation and Low Income (FiGLI) Graduate Student Association. FiGLI was founded by Rachel King and Taylor Brown in August 2019 with the goals of creating a community and providing resources for first generation and low income graduate students. You can find more information about the organization on their Facebook page.
6/4/19: A new paper by Amy Krosch and David Amodio has been accepted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Read it here: Scarcity disrupts neural encoding of Black Faces: A socio-perceptual pathway to discrimination.
5/31/19: Congrats to our new RA Katie Kuhl for being awarded the Berman Family summer experience grant and the A&S summer experience grant from Cornell’s Arts & Sciences Career Development Center. As a result of this grant, she will be able to work with the Krosch Lab throughout the summer! We look forward to having you, Katie!
5/9/19: Mikaela Spruill and Stephanie Tepper have been awarded the Center for the Study of Inequality’s Graduate Student Seed Grant for their research proposal entitled Increasing Support for Reparations: The Role of Framing, Stereotype Endorsement, and Structural Beliefs about Inequality, which will be used to study the factors influencing people's attitudes towards reparations with the aim of promoting support for these policies and programs. Congratulations, Mikaela and Stephanie!
1/4/19: Congratulations to Amy Krosch on being designated a APS Rising Star!
1/4/19: Amy Krosch will be hosting a table at the SPSP mentor lunch on Friday, February 8th from 12:30-1:45pm. The topic will be “Thriving as an Underrepresented Minority in Academia: Overcoming Challenges and Creating Safer Spaces."
11/14/18: Congratulations to our very own Mikaela Spruill, Stephanie Tepper, and Rachel King who, along with a couple of their fellow first year Psychology graduate students, placed first in Statistics focused trivia night!
9/6/18: Stephanie Tepper will be a panelist for a professional development session (“Post-bac career exploration in Social/Personality psychology”) at SPSP 2019.
9/6/18: Mikaela Spruill will be presenting a poster (“Challenging the status quo: System Justification theory and impressions of activists”) at SPSP 2019
9/6/18: Rachel King will be presenting a poster (“Attention to social relationship cues predicts school success in early childhood”) at SPSP 2019
8/9/18: Stephanie Tepper will be presenting a poster entitled “Invoking busyness to nudge tax preparation choices” at the 2018 SJDM meeting
5/2/18: Suzy Park successfully defends her honors thesis: "The changing face of race in a "majority-minority" America: Perceptual effects of advanced minority social status" - Way to go SUZY!!!!
11/8/17: Congratulations to Suzy Park! Suzy received both an Einhorn Discovery Grant and a Cornell Undergraduate Research Grant for her honors thesis.
10/14/17: Talk by Amy Krosch & Mina Cikara : 'Learning from in-group and out-group peers guides discriminatory behavior' at SESP 2017
9/15/17: New paper by Krosch et al. Read it here: Race and recession: The effect of economic scarcity and egalitarian motivation on racial discrimination.
12/11: New paper accepted in Science Advances! with ~250 researchers around the world Addressing Climate Change with Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries. Science Advances.
9/21/23: New paper out in Psych Science! With Benedek Kurdi and Melissa Ferguson: Oppressed groups engender implicit positivity: Seven demonstrations using novel and familiar targets.
5/23/23: Prof Krosch awarded the 2023 Morgan Chia-Wen Sze and Bobbi Josephine Hernandez Distinguished Teaching Prize
5/12/23: Dr. Mikaela Spruill inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and received an award for her paper How do people come to judge what is reasonable? Effects of legal and sociological systems on human psychology
May 2023 - Congratulations DOCTOR Spruill and DOCTOR Tepper!!!
5/12/23: Kirstan Brodie received an exceptional department service award!
11/16/22: Mikaela Spruill is presenting for the Graduate Research Seminar, "Legal Inequity in Context: Theoretical and Empirical Insights into our Judgements and Decisions". Join in person or on Zoom at 12:20 PM ET.
11/16/22: Chadé Darby and Claire Malcomb speak at the Virtual Building Allyship Series (12:00 - 1:30 PM ET)! Register here.
11/01/22: Chadé's paper, Black Employees' Allyship Needs was accepted at the Rising Scholar's Conference at the University of Chicago. Check out the conference here!
9/26/22: Amy publishes new Science & Society paper Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Threat alters race perception to facilitate discrimination.
8/10/22: Amy and Kirstan won a grant! Cornell MRI Facility Pilot Award: Reward Learning as a Mechanism of Stereotype Persistence
8/05/22: Chadé Darby presented her paper Black Employees' Allyship Needs as part of the Perceiving and Disrupting Discrimination in Organizations symposium at the Academy of Management Conference in Seattle, Washington.
8/01/22: We welcome Nexus Scholars 2022 Laila Dancy and Hyacinth White-Grey to the lab! Read more about them here.
7/29/22: Amy was elected a Fellow to the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Congrats Amy!
6/20/22: Amy publishes a new paper with Michael Berkebile-Weinberg and David Amodio in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, read it here: Economic scarcity increases racial stereotyping in beliefs and face representation.
5/31/22: We welcome Laila Dancy and Hyacinth White-Grey from the Nexus Scholars Program 2022 into the lab for the Summer! Read more about Laila and Hya here!
5/27/22: Anna Hu has been selected to give the student speech at the Human Development/Psychology Departmental Ceremony! Congratulations, Anna!
5/13/22: Breanna Green and Mikaela Spuill won Graduate Diversity & Inclusion Awards! Congratulations!
4/29/22: Amy and Mikaela were invited to speak at the Inclusive Excellence Summit!
The talk, Psychological Barriers to Reparations, will be held at 9:15-10:45 A.M.
4/4/22: Kirstan Brodie wins the NSF GRFP!
3/18/22: Mikaela Spruill publishes Legal descriptions of police officers affect how citizens judge them with Dr. Neil Lewis Jr. in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology!
3/11/22: Claire Sandman successfully defends her Master's Thesis, Gender Allyship in Organizations. Congratulations, Claire!
3/3/22: Anna Hu wins the A&S Undergrad Research Program Travel Award for her presentation at SPSP 2022, see her poster here
2/17/22-2/19/22: Four of our team members presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention. Click here to learn more about Kirstan Brodie, Celia Guillard, Anna Hu, and Mikaela Spruill's presentations!
1/2022: Anna Hu won The Psychology Department Undergraduate Travel Award, and SPSP Annual Conference Diversity Undergraduate Award
12/2021: Tara Soltani graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor's of Art in B.A. in Information Science and Psychology, and is continuing work as a Research Assistant in the Krosch Lab
12/6/2021: The Krosch Lab welcomes Youssef Amin as the new lab manager
6/2021: Tara Soltani was accepted into the RISE program at Rutgers with the NJSC Grant
7/14/2020: Celia Guillard co-authored and presented Perceived victoomhood shapes support for violent political extremism at the annual meeting of The International Society for Political Psychology.
12/13/19: A new paper by Rachel King and her colleagues has been accepted in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Read it here: Counterstereotyping can change children’s thinking about boys’ and girls’ toy preferences
11/20/19: Rachel King was recently featured in a Cornell Chronicle article highlighting Cornell’s First Generation and Low Income (FiGLI) Graduate Student Association. FiGLI was founded by Rachel King and Taylor Brown in August 2019 with the goals of creating a community and providing resources for first generation and low income graduate students. You can find more information about the organization on their Facebook page.
6/4/19: A new paper by Amy Krosch and David Amodio has been accepted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Read it here: Scarcity disrupts neural encoding of Black Faces: A socio-perceptual pathway to discrimination.
5/31/19: Congrats to our new RA Katie Kuhl for being awarded the Berman Family summer experience grant and the A&S summer experience grant from Cornell’s Arts & Sciences Career Development Center. As a result of this grant, she will be able to work with the Krosch Lab throughout the summer! We look forward to having you, Katie!
5/9/19: Mikaela Spruill and Stephanie Tepper have been awarded the Center for the Study of Inequality’s Graduate Student Seed Grant for their research proposal entitled Increasing Support for Reparations: The Role of Framing, Stereotype Endorsement, and Structural Beliefs about Inequality, which will be used to study the factors influencing people's attitudes towards reparations with the aim of promoting support for these policies and programs. Congratulations, Mikaela and Stephanie!
1/4/19: Congratulations to Amy Krosch on being designated a APS Rising Star!
1/4/19: Amy Krosch will be hosting a table at the SPSP mentor lunch on Friday, February 8th from 12:30-1:45pm. The topic will be “Thriving as an Underrepresented Minority in Academia: Overcoming Challenges and Creating Safer Spaces."
11/14/18: Congratulations to our very own Mikaela Spruill, Stephanie Tepper, and Rachel King who, along with a couple of their fellow first year Psychology graduate students, placed first in Statistics focused trivia night!
9/6/18: Stephanie Tepper will be a panelist for a professional development session (“Post-bac career exploration in Social/Personality psychology”) at SPSP 2019.
9/6/18: Mikaela Spruill will be presenting a poster (“Challenging the status quo: System Justification theory and impressions of activists”) at SPSP 2019
9/6/18: Rachel King will be presenting a poster (“Attention to social relationship cues predicts school success in early childhood”) at SPSP 2019
8/9/18: Stephanie Tepper will be presenting a poster entitled “Invoking busyness to nudge tax preparation choices” at the 2018 SJDM meeting
5/2/18: Suzy Park successfully defends her honors thesis: "The changing face of race in a "majority-minority" America: Perceptual effects of advanced minority social status" - Way to go SUZY!!!!
11/8/17: Congratulations to Suzy Park! Suzy received both an Einhorn Discovery Grant and a Cornell Undergraduate Research Grant for her honors thesis.
10/14/17: Talk by Amy Krosch & Mina Cikara : 'Learning from in-group and out-group peers guides discriminatory behavior' at SESP 2017
9/15/17: New paper by Krosch et al. Read it here: Race and recession: The effect of economic scarcity and egalitarian motivation on racial discrimination.
I am hoping recruit students for the upcoming (2024) application cycle! See more here
Graduate Students
If you are interested in joining the lab as a PhD student, please read this page first.
It includes information about recent lab projects, papers, advice on writing a research statement, information about the psychology department, the grad school, and the Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement, and fellowship opportunities for underrepresented applicants.
Applications to the Cornell PhD program in psychology are due on December 1, 2023.
Research assistants
We are always looking for research assistants with experience in EEG, fMRI, or eye tracking methods or research assistants with a programming background (e.g., R, MATLAB, Python, etc.)! If you are interested in joining the lab as a research assistant, please complete the short application form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Feel free to email with any questions!
contact us
Our lab respects and values the full spectrum of human diversity in race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, body type, socio-economic background, age, disability, and national origin. We strive for inclusion and diversity in achievement and sustained excellence through our research, training, and outreach, and actively seek to promote people underrepresented in psychology. Students of color, women, first generation students, and other underrepresented folks are strongly encouraged to apply to join.