Yale Intergroup Relations Lab

John F. Dovidio [Website][CV]

My work centers around issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals. I explore both conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) influences on how people think about, feel about, and behave toward others based on group membership. I continue to conduct research on aversive racism, a contemporary subtle form of prejudice, and on techniques for reducing conscious and unconscious biases.

Jillian Banfield [CV]

Jillian Banfield is a postdoctoral fellow working in Jack Dovidio's Yale Intergroup Relations lab. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo, where she worked with Aaron Kay and Mike Ross. Her research interests include intergroup helping behavior, support for redressing historical injustices, political ideology, and food policy. Jillian is particularly interested in studying 1) the motivators and 2) the consequences of intergroup helping.

Paula Brochu [Website][CV]

Paula Brochu is a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab with Jack Dovidio. Her postdoctoral fellowship is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Western Ontario, under the supervision of Vicki Esses. Her primary research interests involve examining the processes underlying the expression of prejudice and the consequences of stigma. Much of her research focuses on weight bias and weight stigma.

Corinne Moss-Racusin [Website][CV]

Corinne Moss-Racusin is a postdoctoral associate in the Yale Intergroup Relations lab as well as the Yale Center for Scientific Teaching (working with Jack Dovidio and Jo Handelsman). After completing her undergraduate work at New York University, she received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Rutgers University. Her work focuses on understanding and ameliorating inequality within institutions. Generally, she is interested in stereotyping processes and diversity, gender roles, and implicit social cognition. More specifically, she studies the ways in which stereotypes shape behavior, social judgments, and self-regulation, and how these in turn impact intergroup relations and the equitable treatment of stigmatized group members within institutions.

Sylvia Perry [Website]

Sylvia Perry is a Postdoctoral Associate working primarily with John Dovidio (in the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab) and Michelle van Ryn (in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health). She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Fall of 2010. Her research, broadly speaking, focuses on issues related to intergroup bias, bias reduction, and intergroup interactions. With her current work, Sylvia is exploring: (a) how people respond to accusations of bias, and the importance of people’s pre-existing awareness of their biases (or bias awareness) in these contexts; (b) bias awareness in children, and the development of bias awareness over time; and (c) the various situational and individual factors that contribute to healthcare disparities.

Allecia Reid

Allecia Reid is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, where Jack Dovidio is her primary mentor. She received her doctorate in social psychology from Arizona State University. Broadly, Allecia’s research focuses on the application of social psychological constructs and findings to the promotion of health protective behaviors. Current research projects examine the application of normative information to behavior change, psychosocial mechanisms through which social norms influence behavior, and potential moderators of the influence of social norms on behavior.

Sara Burke

Sara Burke is a second-year doctoral student. She received her BA in psychology, English, and statistics from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include exploring variations in the way prejudice operates when it targets different types of groups, and one of her central goals is expanding the body of information about intergroup bias to account better for dimensions of prejudice which have received less attention than race and gender, including intersecting stigmatized identities. Within this framework, she is particularly interested in identifying causal relationships among stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and experiences of stigma, as well as understanding the internet as a social environment in which bias (and reactions to bias) can operate.

Kevin Callender

Kevin is a third-year doctoral student. He received his BA in psychology, with minors in applied statistics and moral philosophy from the University of Michigan. He is primarily interested in exploring the dynamic roles of stereotypes and prejudice in discrimination against sexual minorities--especially within the workplace context. In applying this research, he would like to develop brief, feasible and easily implementable interventions for reducing formal workplace discrimination. Outside the realm of academia, Kevin is keenly interested in management consulting, business strategy, and statistical modeling.

Ruth Ditlmann

Ruth Ditlmann is a 5th year doctoral student. Ruth received her Diploma in Psychology from the University of Constance, Germany in 2007. Her research focuses on the role of identity in minority exclusion, particularly across cultures and subcultures. In her main line of research she investigates how national identity shapes people's reaction to immigrants in the United States and in Germany. In a project with Richard Eibach and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, she investigates patterns of discrimination against targets with either one or several marginalized identities. She has also conducted research on how perceptions of multicultural policies differ depending on the ethnic background of the perceiver with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and on how contextual cues shape expectations towards minority and majority members. To investigate her questions of interest she adopts a multi-method approach, consisting of surveys, laboratory studies, content analysis and most recently field experimentation.

Suzanne Horwitz [Website]

Suzanne Horwitz is a 4th year doctoral student. Prior to joining the Intergroup Relations Lab, she received her BS in psychology from Tufts University, worked at the Rochester Baby Lab under Richard Aslin, and was a student of Karen Wynn and Kristina Olson in the developmental psychology program at Yale. Her current interests lie at the intersection of social psychology and developmental psychology, focusing on how social group attitudes form and develop. Suzanne's work examines how perceptions of social class influence social evaluations.

Jamie Luguri [Website][CV]

Jamie Luguri is a 3rd year doctoral student. She received her BS in psychology and political science from Union College. Broadly, she is interested in researching political psychology, religion, and gender. Her current research is examining the impact of construal level on religious orientation and prejudice towards different out-groups. In other research, she examines the palliative role religion can play when people are faced with injustice.

Erin L. Thomas [Website]

Erin L. Thomas' research program is guided by three primary objectives: 1) identifying the cognitive and motivated origins of intersectional invisibility, 2) developing and implementing interventions to manipulate perceptions of social prototypicality, 3) revealing the positive and negative consequences of non-prototypicality. She explores these phenomena in social, organizational, policy, and economic domains and she employs implicit reaction time, economic game, and ethnographic methodologies in the lab, via the Internet, and in the field. She is currently applying findings from these projects to inform a new line of research that examines the consequences of social non-prototypicality and experiences of social invisibility from the target's perspective.

Katie Wang

Katie Wang is a fourth-year doctoral student. She received her BAs in psychology and statistics from Rice University. Katie's primary interests focus on the experience of disadvantaged group members as stigmatized targets and how different factors influence the ways they respond to prejudice and discrimination. Her current line of research examines how the utilization of different emotion regulation strategies shapes women's decision of whether to confront prejudice. She is also interested in understanding the experiences of stigmatized groups who are relatively under-represented in the intergroup literature, such as people with disabilities.

Silvia Abad-Merino

Silvia Abad-Merino is a visiting doctoral student at Yale and a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Cordoba, with a concentration in Social Psychology. She received her Bachelor of Science in Education and a Masters of Education in Educational Psychology, with a prestigious honors award from the University of Cordoba.  She also received the Second Spanish National Award from The Ministry of Education of Spain. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Stockholm, the University of Oxford, and the University of Ulster. Silvia’s current research interests lie in examining how bias towards different ethnic groups in heterogeneous societies affects the development of prosocial behavior. Specifically, she looks at the intersections of psychological, social, and the cultural factors that impact decision making based on various aspects of identity, including, race, culture and gender.

Yoona Kang

Yoona is a 6th-year graduate student in cognitive psychology and affiliated Yale Intergroup Relations Lab graduate student (primarily advised by Jeremy Gray). She is interested in the effect of different forms of meditation on intergroup and interpersonal relations. She also explores mechanistic underpinnings of such effects, using different techniques including response latency tasks, psychophysiological responses, and fMRI. Yoona completed her undergraduate education at UCLA, and is originally from Seoul, Korea. She is also the proud mother of a very cute dog Nana.

Lisa Paymer Dodge

Lisa Paymer Dodge is a research assistant working with Dr. Dovidio. Graduating with High Honors in Psychology, she received her BA (cum laude) from Colgate University. She then did graduate work in the field of Organizational Behavior at CUNY at Baruch in New York City. With Dr. Dovidio, her present line of research concentrates on the possible effects of Social Identity Complexity and Self Identity Complexity on an individual's ability to successfully navigate intergroup interactions in both academic and business settings.

Fabian Schellhaas

Fabian is a visiting student from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is interested in the social psychology of intergroup inequality, collective action towards social change, as well as morality and justice. In his research with Jack, Fabian explores (1) when and why members of privileged groups struggle for social equality, and (2) how intergroup justice perceptions vary across social categorizations.

Hyeyoung Shin

Hyeyoung Shin is a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park (with Dr. Charles Stangor) and a visiting graduate student/research associate for Dr. John Dovidio at the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab. She received a B.A. magna cum laude in psychology from the University of Maryland College Park and a M.A. in psychology from New York University (with Dr. James Uleman). She also worked at the Child & Family Research lab at NIH as a data analyst for Dr. Marc Bornstein. She has been conducting research on what makes people have prejudice toward certain social groups or categories and the different processes that underlie these biases across cultures. Her recent work (with Dr. John Dovidio and Dr. Jaime Napier) examined cultural differences in targets of stigmatization between individual- and group- oriented cultures. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on mediation effects of cultural norms and values on cultural differences in prejudice between individual- and group-oriented cultures.