Research Interests

A passion for social justice, social equity, diversity, and inclusion drives all my research, which I apply to my teaching pedagogy to include diverse populations in cutting-edge research. My research broadly centers on prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and how these factors shape the perceptions of targets and perceivers. Presently, my research focus examines how social identity and morality (e.g., taboo tradeoffs and moral hypocrisy) influence people’s support for reparative policies such as House Resolution 40 (H.R. 40) and perceptions of racial wealth inequality. My research also investigates how social identity and social identity threat affect people’s mental representations (i.e., mental images) and perceptions of specific social categories (e.g., Black men, STEM professors, police officers) and individuals that belong to multiple social categories (e.g., Biracial/Multiracial people, Black women, female STEM professors, Black police officers).

​

My dissertation is aimed at leveraging social and moral psychology to increase people’s support for reparative policies. Testing, for example, whether instrumental uses (i.e., equal opportunities for all and mutual economic benefits) and moral hypocrisy (informing on past U.S. reparations paid to relevant social groups) interventions can increase support for H.R. 40 amongst White Liberals. This works has implications for decreasing the Black-White racial wealth gap in the U.S. I am also currently designing experiments to investigate how Black men’s expectation to be mentally represented by police officers as criminals negatively impacts their anticipated interactions with police officers as well as how female STEM students’ stereotypical mental representations of STEM professors negatively impact their belong in STEM domains. Understanding how Black men’s and female STEM students’ identity concerns when interacting with police officers and STEM professors, respectively, impact their interaction expectancies has the potential to inform interventions to improve such interactions.