Research
Our Mission
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.
MOTIVATED RACE PERCEPTION
How do our goals and motivations influence the way we “see” race? How does this impact discrimination?
Although race is often regarded as fixed and veridically perceived, representations of a person’s race or ethnicity can shift as a function of a perceiver’s social goals and motivations. Such biases in race perception have profound implications for the expression of racial bias. We argue that, in particular, threat alters race perception to facilitate discrimination. Ongoing research in our lab examines how group-based motives (e.g., ones’ political ideology, motivation to preserve resources for one's ingroup, or attempts to preserve white supremacy) influence the perception of race at multiple levels of analysis to promote discriminatory behavior.
Mechanisms of intergroup harm
How do we overcome a natural aversion to harm? Why is this so much easier for outgroup than ingroup members?
In several streams of research, we employ behavioral decision tasks, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging to examine dampened arousal and perceptual dehumanization as common mechanisms of intergroup bias across types of harm (money loss, physical pain) and group membership (racial, partisan). In another line, we examine how ideological asymmetries can predict harm even against the most minimal outgroups.
barriers to inequality-reduction
Why don’t most White people support reparations? Why is it so hard to acknowledge the role of privilege in one’s accomplishments? Does talking about oppression lead to negativity toward oppressed groups?
We examine how psychological barriers like negative economic stereotypes, misperceptions of inequality, and zero-sum beliefs prevent support for policies aimed at reducing inequality (e.g., reparations, baby-bonds). We also examine how perceptions of privilege and merit are dependently linked such that acknowledging privilege is commonly seen as a denial of deservingness which reduces support for inequality reducing measures. In this work we also re-examine work suggesting that portraying a social group as a target of oppression (discrimination, slavery, or genocide) results in negative implicit evaluations of that group. We show that in some cases it can create positivity – undermining recent arguments that teaching about institutional racism should be avoided because it portrays Black Americans in a negative light.
Check out our Papers/Press for more.