Colloquium

Mina Cikara, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

Dr. Cikara is a social psychologist who is known for her research on intergroup relations and social cognition. She has conducted influential studies on the cognitive and neural processes that underlie intergroup biases, such as prejudice and discrimination, and has examined ways to reduce these biases.

Title: Causes and Consequences of Coalitional Cognition

Abstract: What is a group? How do we know to which groups we belong? How do we assign others to groups? A great deal of theorizing across the social sciences has conceptualized ‘groups’ as synonymous with ‘categories,’ however there are a number of limitations to this approach: particularly for making predictions about novel intergroup contexts or about how intergroup dynamics will change over time. Here I present two projects that offer alternative frameworks for thinking about these questions. First I review some recent work elucidating the cognitive processes that give rise to the inference of coalitions (even in the absence of category labels). Then I'll discuss an ongoing project on the effects of social group reference dependence--which falls out of coalitional reasoning--on hate crimes in the U.S. between 1990 and 2010.

Please join us before the presentation at 3:30 pm for cookies, coffee, and conversation outside room 041.