Research

Social Class and Choice

Our projects examine the meanings of choice for people from different social class backgrounds in the United States. This research consists of running experiments in real world settings, conducting interviews, and analyzing cultural products. On a theoretical level, we contend that the attitudinal and behavioral differences between people engaged with different social class contexts reflect divergent models of agency (or ideas about how to be a good person) prevalent in each context.

Choice, Preference, and Decision-Making

Does choice always reveal some sort of preference? Are people always motivated to express their preferences? Is the process by which people make decisions similar in different cultures? Are people equally likely to construct the world in terms of choices? And more fundamentally, what counts as a choice or a decision? These are some of the research questions that we are exploring in our group, comparing choice in Indian and American cultural contexts to evaluate theories in psychology, decision-making, and economics.

African American Biculturalism

This research examines the African American self-concept through a cultural frame that incorporates Afro-centric and Eurocentric worldviews. Specifically it investigates how activating domains of African American or Mainstream American culture can produce behaviors that are consistent with the primed culture. Present studies are examining the effects of priming African American or White American culture on cooperation and perceived favorability.

Policing Racial Bias

Professor Eberhardt is seeking one advanced undergraduate research assistant to work closely with her on her upcoming book, entitled Policing Racial Bias. The book will canvas the social-psychological literature on racial bias, focusing on the policing domain, and will report the results of collaborative research conducted with social psychologists and law enforcement personnel. Responsibilities of the research assistant will include extensive online research (familiarity with Google and bibliographic databases such as PsycInfo is assumed) for topical literature, news coverage of racial incidents in policing, etc., and possibly editing chapters.

Agency and Emotion

This work examines cultural variation in attributions for agency and emotion. Our previous work has demonstrated that Americans are more likely to explain action (e.g., Olympic victory) in terms of internal states and individual athletic strengths, whereas Japanese are more likely to discuss athletes’ weaknesses and social support. Our current projects examine the effect to which each of these perspectives gives rise to differences in perceived emotion between American and Japanese participants.

Race and Anthropomorphism

This work examines the extent to which associating social groups with abstract shapes in a moving schematic diagram causes people to interpret those shapes differently. In previous research, participants consistently attribute human motives and emotions to the movement of the shapes, and we are interested in whether those attributions will conform to group stereotypes if we induce people to associate the shapes with social groups.

Race and the Malleability of Traits

Do people have different ideas about how much potential people of different races have to grow, develop, and change? This research examines how thinking about people of different races influences one's ideas about whether a person's intelligence, personality or other characteristics are fixed or changeable. We have found that White Americans seem to think that Black Americans are less able to improve and grow, even if they are motivated to do so. This research will explore the implications of these different "mindsets" in a number of different settings. For example, in a school setting, are Black students seen as less likely to improve if they initially get a bad grade in a class? In the workplace, are Black job applicants less likely than White applicants to be hired because they are viewed as less able to learn "on the job?" In the criminal justice system, are Black Americans who have committed a crime seen as having less potential to be rehabilitated and instead more likely to reoffend?

Race and Space

Do spaces have races? This project investigates whether people assign racial labels to certain locations (for example, inner cities are Black and suburbs are White). One line of work asks how being primed with these racially imbued locations affects the way we think and feel about the people associated with them. Another line of work asks how being primed with either White people or Black people affects the way we perceive, treat, and value a physical location. Finally, we are investigating how these findings can be applied to different domains of racial bias, including housing discrimination, resource allocation in schools, and environmental racism.

Scientific Representations of Race

Western culture has for a long time dealt with race in scientific terms, but from evolution to genetics the issue of race must be addressed either directly or indirectly. How it has been addressed and represented to the public at large has had effects on how race has been constructed in the minds of non-scientists and scientists alike. This research program aims to find how people include race-related scientific information in their own everyday definitions of race, specific racial groups, and how they may use these ideas to explain racial inequality today.

Politics of Mixed Race

This research investigates the way mixed race identity is represented within mainstream America, as well as within American politics more specifically. We are interested in whether this identity is used to forward an agenda that supports taking a "colorblind" approach to diversity. Our studies ask: Is mixed race identity represented in a way that invalidates the use of race-conscious social policy? Are potential voters influenced by these representations when deciding whether to support policies like Affirmative Action?

Beliefs and Stereotypes

In this research, we ask whether our most basic beliefs about how the world works can affect what we see. Previous research shows that beliefs can affect what we notice, and we're trying to examine whether beliefs are so powerful, they affect the speed and direction of our visual attention systems. In other words, when someone holds a stereotypical belief about a group, and they see a member of that group, what aspects of the individual do the eyes attend to first--and how does this affect stereotype maintenance?