Faculty Research Interests

2007-2008

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

 

Banaji, Mahzarin Rustum (Professional Research). Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Radcliffe — Mahzarin Banaji received her PhD from Ohio State University in 1986 and taught at Yale University until 2001. She studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social context. Her focus is primarily on systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode and their relationship to conscious social cognition. She is interested in the assessments of self and other humans that reflect thoughts and feelings, often unintended, about their social group membership (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, class). Her work relies on cognitive/affective behavioral measures and neuroimaging (fMRI). Recently, she has begun exploring the origins of implicit social cognition in young children to understand its acquisition and development. From such study, she asks about the social consequences of unintended thought and feeling, and its implications for theories of individual responsibility and social justice.

Publications (2003-2004):

Devos, T. & Banaji, M.R. (2003). Implicit self and identity. In M. Leary and
J. Tangney (Eds.) Handbook of Self and Identity, 153-175. New York, The Guilford Press.

[Reprinted In J. LeDoux, J. Debiec and H. Moss (Eds.) The Self: From Soul To Brain, Annals of the N.Y. Academy of Science, 1001, 177–211. New York, AAAS].

Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). (At least) two factors mediate the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. R. K. Ohme & M. Jarymowicz (Eds.), Natura Automatyzmow, 49-55, Warszawa: WIP PAN & SWPS.

Lane, K.A., & Banaji, M.R. (2003). Evaluative group status and implicit attitudes toward the ingroup. In R. K. Ohme & M. Jarymowica (Eds.), Natura Automatyzmow 25-30, Warszawa: WIP PAN & SWPS.

Banaji, M.R. (2003). Rejtzköd attit dök és szterertípiák. Budapest: Osiris iadó. [Automatic attitudes and stereotypes. Collected papers translated into Hungarian, Budapest: Osiris Kiadó.]

Jost, J., Banaji, M. R., & Prentice, D. A. (2003). The yin and yang of progress in social psychology: Perspectivism at work. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Banaji, M. R. (2003). The opposite of a great truth is also true. In J. Jost, D. Prentice, & M. R. Banaji (Eds.) The yin and yang of progress in social psychology: Perspectivism at work, 127-140. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Greenwald, A.G., Nosek, B.A., & Banaji, M.R. (2003). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: 1. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197-216.

Mitchell, J. P., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Contextual variations in implicit evaluations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 455-469.

Cunningham, W. A., Johnson, M. K., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., Banaji, M. R. (2003). Neural components of social evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 639-649.

Banaji, M. R. Bazerman, M., Chugh, D. (2003). How (Un)Ethical Are You? Harvard Business Review. 81, 56-64.

Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo. Political Psychology, 25, 881-919.

Dasgupta, N., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (in press). The first ontological challenge to the IAT. Psychological Inquiry.

Kraut, R., Olson, J., Banaji, M. R., Bruckman, A., Cohen, J., Couper, M. (2004). Psychological research online: Opportunities and challenges. American Psychologist, 59, No. 2, 105-117.

Cunningham, W. A., Nezlek, J., & Banaji, M. R. (2004). Implicit and explicit ethnocentrism: Revisiting the ideologies of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1332-1346.

Walton, G. M., & Banaji, M. R. (2004). Being what you say: The effect of essentialist linguistic labels on preferences. Social Cognition, 22, 193-213.

Cunningham, W.A., Johnson, M.K., Raye, C.L., Gatenby, J.C., Gore, J.C., & Banaji, M.R. (in press). Dissociated Conscious and Unconscious Evaluations of Social Groups: An fMRI Investigation.
Psychological Science.

Chugh, D., Bazerman, M. & Banaji, M. R. (in press). Bounded Ethicality as a Psychological Barrier to Recognizing Conflicts of Interest.

Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2004). Encoding-specific effects of social cognition on the neural correlates of subsequent memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 4912-4917.

Gilbert, Daniel Todd — Professor Gilbert received his BA from the University of Colorado (1981) and his PhD from Princeton University (1985). His research on “affective forecasting” is an attempt to understand how and how well people predict their emotional reactions to future events.

Some recent publications on this topic:
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 617-638.

Gilbert, D. T., Brown, R. P., Pinel, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2000). The illusion of external agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 690-700.

Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 503-514.

Gilbert, D. T., Lieberman, M. D., Morewedge, C. K., & Wilson, T. D. (2004). The peculiar longevity of things not so bad. Psychological Science, 15, 14-19.

Greene, Joshua — Joshua Greene received his AB in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997 and his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 2002. Since 1999 he has trained as a cognitive neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, joining the department as a postdoctoral fellow in 2002. His primary research interest is the psychological and neuroscientific study of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotional and “cognitive” processes in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He is currently writing a book about the philosophical implications of our emerging scientific understanding of morality.

Selected recent publications:

Greene, J.D., Sommerville, R.B., Nystrom, L.E., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, Vol. 293, 2105-2108.

Greene, J. and Haidt, J. (2002) How (and where) does moral judgment work? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(12), 517-523.

Greene, J.D. (2003) From neural “is” to moral “ought”: what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 4, 847-850.

Greene, J.D., Nystrom, L.E., Engell, A.D., Darley, J.M., Cohen, J.D. (2004)
The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, Vol. 44, 389-400.

Greene, J. D. , Cohen J. D. (2004) For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 359, 1775-17785.

Hackman, J. Richard — His research includes studies of the behavior and performance of work teams, social influences on individual behavior in organizations, and the leadership of groups and organizations. Recent research includes studies of group and organizational factors that influence the performance of aircraft cockpit crews, a series of studies of leadership and ensemble dynamics in symphony and chamber orchestras, and research on the dynamics of teams that analyze intelligence data.

Selected recent publications:
Allmendinger, J., Hackman, J. R., & Lehman, E. V. (1996). Life and work in symphony orchestras. The Musical Quarterly, 80, 194-219.

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston: HBS Press.

Hackman, J. R. (2003). Learning more from crossing levels: Evidence from airplanes, orchestras, and hospitals. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 24, 1-18.

Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). When and how team leaders matter. Research in organizational behavior, 26, 37-74.

Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2007). Asking the right questions about leadership. American Psychologist, 62, 43-47.

Langer, Ellen J. — Ellen Langer earned her PhD at Yale University in 1974 in Social and Clinical Psychology. She taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for three years before joining the faculty at Harvard. She is a social psychologist whose applied interests influence many of the problems she chooses to study. From the perspective of her mindfulness theory, her research explores both conscious and non-conscious influences regarding the general areas of health, decision-making, aging, perceived control, and stereotyping

Representative publications:

Langer, E. (2005) On Becoming an Artist, Ballantine: NY

Langer, E.J. & Golub, S.A. (2004). Theories of adult development and their implications for the health of older adults. In C.M. Aldwin, C.L. Park, & A. Spiro (Eds.), Handbook of Health Psychology and Aging: New Directions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Moldoveanu, M.C. & Langer, E. (2002). False memories of the future: A critique of probabilistic reasoning. Psychological Review, 358-375.

Langer, E. (2002). Well being: Mindfulness vs. Positive Evaluation. In C.R. Snyder, (Ed.), Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York: Oxford University.

1997. The Power of Mindful Learning, Addison Wesley.

1994. The Illusion of Calculated Decision Making. In R. Schank and E. Langer (Ed.), Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision Making, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

1989. Mindfulness, Addison Wesley.

Mendes, Wendy — Wendy Berry Mendes obtained her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2002 and then completed a post-doctoral training program in Psychology and Medicine at UC San Francisco. Her research falls at the intersection of psychology, biology, and health, specifically the extent to which social factors affect stress, motivation, and emotion as evidenced in observable changes in endocrine, immune and autonomic nervous systems. From a psychological perspective, she focuses on social factors such as social isolation, rejection, concealment, discrimination, and stigmatization. In the context of these social factors, her work examines acute changes in biological functioning in laboratory-based studies. These studies represent more traditional social psychological methodologies. Similar to medical and health research, her research also relies on field and prospective studies in which she examines how these factors experienced chronically can alter physiology and how the effects of these alterations may relate to mental and physical disease etiology and disease progression.

Some relevant publications:

Mendes, W. B., Gray, H., Mendoza-Denton, Major, B. & Epel, E. (in press) Why egalitarianism might be good for your health: Physiological thriving during inter-racial interactions. Psychological Science.

Mendes, W. B., Major, B., McCoy, S., & Blascovich, J. (in press). How attributional ambiguity shapes physiological and emotional responses to social rejection and acceptance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Mendes, W. B., Blascovich, J., Hunter, S., Lickel, B., & Jost, J. (2007). Threatened by the unexpected: Challenge and threat during inter-ethnic interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Weisbuch, M., Mendes, W. B., Seery, M D., & Blascovich, J. (2005). The psychological influence of stimuli outside of subjective awareness during motivated performance situations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1203-1216.

Mendes, W. B., Reis, H., Seery, M.D., & Blascovich, J. (2003). Cardiovascular correlates of emotional expression and suppression: Do content and gender context matter? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 771-792.

Mendes, W. B., Blascovich, J., Lickel, B., & Hunter, S. (2002). Cardiovascular reactivity during social interactions with White and Black men. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 939-952.

Mendes, W. B., Blascovich, J., Major, B. & Seery, M. D. (2001). Challenge and threat during upward and downward social comparisons, European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 477-479.

Mitchell, Jason — Jason Mitchell received his BA/MS from Yale University (1997) and his PhD from Harvard University (2003). His research focuses on the cognitive processes that allow perceivers to infer the mental states of other people. Recently, this work has used neuroimaging techniques (fMRI) to examine the neural basis of understanding mental state terms, forming impressions of other people, and using knowledge about oneself as the basis for inferring the mental characteristics of others (i.e., simulation theory).

Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2004). Encoding-specificeffects of social cognition on the neural correlates of subsequent memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 4912-4917.

Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2005). Forming impressions of people versus inanimate objects: Social-cognitiveprocessing in the medial prefrontal cortex, NeuroImage, 26, 251-257.

Mitchell, J. P., Banaji, M. R., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The link betweensocial cognition and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1306-1315.

Mitchell, J. P., Banaji, M. R., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). General andspecific contributions of the medial prefrontal cortex to knowledge about mental states. NeuroImage.

Mitchell, J. P. (2005). The false dichotomy between simulation and theory-theory: The argument’s error. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 363-364.

Mitchell, J. P. (2006). Mentalizing and Marr: An information processing approach to the study of social cognition. Brain Research, 1079, 66-75.

Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50, 655-663.

Sidanius, James — Jim Sidanius received his PhD at the University of Stockholm, Sweden in 1977. Before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2006, he taught at several universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Stockholm, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Princeton University, and UCLA. His primary research interests include the interface between political ideology and cognitive functioning, the connection between ethnic and national identities within the context of multiethnic states, the political psychology of gender, prejudice and institutional discrimination, and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice and conflict. Most of his recent work has concerned some of the implications of social dominance theory, a general model concerning the development and maintenance of group-based social hierarchy and social oppression.

Publications (2003-2005)

Haley, H., & Sidanius, J. (in press). The Positive and Negative Framing of Affirmative Action: A Group Dominance Perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Sidanius, J., Sinclair, S. & Pratto, F. (in press). Social Dominance Orientation, Gender and Increasing College Exposure. Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Henry, P.J., Sidanius, J., Levin, S., & Pratto, F. (2005). Social Dominance Orientation, Authoritarianism, and Support for Intergroup Violence between the Middle East and America.
Political Psychology, 26, 569-583.

Staerklé, C., Sidanius, J., Green, E.G.T., & Molina, L. (2005). Ethnic minority-majority asymmetry and attitudes towards immigrants across 11 nations. Psicologia Política, 30, 7-26.

Haley, H., & Sidanius, J. (2005). Person-organization Congruence and the Maintenance of Group-Based Social Hierarchy: A Social Dominance Perspective. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 8, 187-203.

Van Laar, C., Levin, S., Sinclair, S., & Sidanius, J. (2005). The Effect of University Roommate Contact on Ethnic Attitudes and Behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 329-345.

Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., van Laar, C., & Levin, S. (2004). Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method. Political Psychology, 25, 845-880.

Peña, Y., Sidanius, J., & Sawyer, M. (2004). “Racial Democracy” in the Americas: A Latin and North American Comparison.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35,
749-767.

Sidanius, J., Van Laar, C., Levin, S., & Sinclair, S. (2004). Ethnic Enclaves and the Dynamics of Social Identity on the College Campus: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 96-110.

Sidanius, J., Henry, P.J., Pratto, F., & Levin, S. (2004). Arab Attributions for the Attack on America: The Case of Lebanese Sub-Elites. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, 403-416.

Haley, H., Sidanius, J., Lowery, B. & Malamuth, N. (2004). The Interactive Nature of Sex and Race Discrimination: A Social Dominance Perspective. In G. Philogene (Ed.), Racial Identity in Context: The Legacy of Kenneth B. Clark. American Psychological Association pp. 149-160.

Sawyer, M. Q., Peña, Y. & Sidanius, J. (2004). Cuban Exceptionalism: Group Based Hierarchy and the Dynamics of Patriotism in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The Dubois Review. 1, 93-114.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (2003). Social dominance theory and the dynamics of inequality: A Reply to Schmitt, Branscombe, & Kappen and Wilson & Liu. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 207-213.

Sidanius, J. and Kurzban, R. (2003). Evolutionary Approaches to Political Psychology. In D.O. Sears, Huddy, L., and Jervis, R. Handbook of Political Psychology, pp. 146-181. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levin, S., Henry, PJ, Pratto, F. & Sidanius, J. (2003). Social Dominance and Social Identity in Lebanon: Implications for Support of Violence against the West. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 6, 353-368.

Sidanius, J., Van Laar, C., Levin, S. & Sinclair, S. (2003). Social Hierarchy Maintenance and Assortment into Social Roles: A Social Dominance Perspective. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 6, 333-352.

Sidanius, J., & Peña, Y. (2003). The Gendered Nature of Family Structure and Group-based Anti-egalitarianism: A Cross-national Analysis. Journal of Social Psychology, 143, 243-251.

Levin, S., Van Laar, C., & Sidanius, J. (2003). The effects of ingroup and outgroup friendships on ethnic attitudes in college: A longitudinal study. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 6, 76-92.

Wegner, Daniel — Daniel Wegner received his BS in 1970 and PhD in 1974 from Michigan State University. His research focuses on the role of thought in self-control and social life. This includes topics such as thought suppression and mental control, transactive memory in relationships and groups, the experience of conscious will, and the perception of other minds.

Some publications representative of these interests include:

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/ Bradford Books.

Wegner, D. M., Sparrow, B., & Winerman, L. (2004). Vicarious agency: Experiencing control over the movements of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 838-848.

Sparrow, B., & Wegner, D. M. (2006). Unpriming: The deactivation of thoughts through expression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 1009-1019.

Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., & Rodriguez, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 218-231.

Gray, H., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315, 619.