Spring 2025 Lab Photo (Rutgers & WashU)
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We study how to reduce subtle or hidden discrimination.
We study how to reduce subtle or hidden discrimination.
Hidden biases within the mind create a gap between what people value (e.g., racial equality) and what people do (e.g., racial discrimination). Our research seeks to close this gap by understanding how these biases work, figuring out how to reduce them, and developing interventions for addressing their consequences.
Lab Updates
Lab Updates
4/25 Grace Drake successfully defended her PhD dissertation defense!
4/25 Jenn Beatty successfully defended her PhD dissertation defense!
4/25 Messi Lee successfully defended his PhD dissertation defense!
2/25 Jenn Beatty co-chaired the “Contextual Considerations for Confronting Prejudice” Symposium at SPSP 2025 and gave a talk titled “Are You a Defensive Person? Feedback Defensiveness across Domains and Individuals.”
2/25 Calvin Lai gave a talk at the "Psychological Interventions in Policing" Symposium titled "How to Build a Better Police Bias Training" at SPSP 2025.
2/25 Grace Drake presented her poster titled, "Does an Intervention to Empower People to Confront Sexism Increase Confronting Behavior?" at SPSP 2025.
2/25 Selin Toprakkiran presented her poster titled, "Perceived Policy Instability and Immigrant Wellbeing in the U.S." at SPSP 2025.
2/25 Selin Toprakkiran presented her talk titled, "When Are Beliefs About Groups Shared? A Mega-Study of Stereotype Consensus" at the Attitudes and Social Influence Preconference at SPSP 2025.
2/25 Calvin Lai gave a talk at the “Advancing Police-Community Research in Personality & Social Psychology” Preconference at SPSP 2025.
11/24 Calvin Lai and Joel Le Forestier's paper, "A comparative investigation of interventions to reduce anti-fat prejudice across five implicit measures" was accepted for publication at Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
11/24 Grace Drake's first-author paper with Calvin Lai and Clara Wilkins, "Solidarity imbalances after racism and sexism: Black Americans are expected to express high solidarity but anticipate lower solidarity from racial/ethnic outgroups," was accepted for publication at Social Psychological and Personality Science.
10/24 Messi Lee received a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity for his project titled “Homogeneity Bias in Large Language Models.”
9/24 Calvin Lai's paper, "A Contest Study to Reduce Attractiveness-Based Discrimination in Social Judgment", was accepted for publication at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
6/24 Selin Toprakkiran's first-author paper with Jon Gordils and Jeremy Jamieson, “Can Democrats and Republicans Like Each Other? Depends on How You Define "American"“, was accepted for publication at Frontiers in Social Psychology.
6/24 Selin Toprakkiran co-chaired a symposium called “Ambiguous Stereotypes: Insights Across Diverse Groups and Dimensions” and gave a talk at SPSSI. The talk was titled “A Mega Study of Stereotype Variability”.
4/24 Jenn Beatty received a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity for her project titled “Measuring Defensiveness about Anti-Black Intergroup Bias.“
4/24 Messi Lee was accepted for OpenAI's Researcher Access Program to continue his research on bias in Large Language Models.
3/24 Messi Lee was awarded the ACM Student Travel Grant to present his research at ACM FAccT 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
3/24 Messi Lee and Calvin Lai’s submission to ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) 2024 titled “Large Language Models Portray Socially Subordinate Groups as More Homogeneous, Consistent with a Bias Observed in Humans” was accepted.
2/24 Selin Toprakkiran received a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity for her project titled “Perception of Immigration Policy Instability.”
2/24 Calvin Lai participated in a panel discussion titled “Grant-seeking from Private Foundations: What Investigators Should Know” at SPSP 2024.
2/24 Grace Drake presented her poster titled “An Intervention to Empower People to Confront Sexism” at SPSP 2024.
2/24 Messi Lee presented his poster titled “Outgroup Homogeneity-like Effect in Large Language Models” at SPSP 2024.
2/24 Jenn Beatty gave a talk at the “Dynamic Intergroup Experiences: Regulatory Perspectives of Perpetrators, Witnesses, and Targets” Symposium titled “A Process Model of Intergroup Bias Regulation” at SPSP 2024.
2/24 Messi Lee was awarded the Outstanding Research Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology.
2/24 Ashley Tudder presented her poster titled “A multi-faceted intervention promotes intergroup empathy through granular emotion reflection” at SPSP 2024.
2/24 Maddie Hammer presented her poster titled “Not “Woman” Enough? Exploring Feminist Allyship Through Implicit Race-Gender Associations” at SPSP 2024.
1/24 Messi Lee and Calvin Lai published a paper in PNAS Nexus titled “America’s racial framework of superiority and Americanness embedded in natural language.”
12/23 Messi Lee presented his paper titled “The Effect of Group Status on the Variability of Group Representations in LLM-generated Text” at 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023).
11/23 Messi Lee was awarded the Graduate Student Conference Travel Award from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity!
10/23 Jenn Beatty, Grace Drake, & Selin Toprakkiran presented their research at the Innovation in Social and Community Psychology Summit.
6/23 Calvin Lai published a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin titled “Individual Differences in Implicit Bias Can Be Measured Reliably by Administering the Same Implicit Association Test Multiple Times.”
5/23 Calvin Lai won the Association for Psychological Science’s Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions.
5/23 Selin Toprakkiran won the SPSSI Travel Award!
Media Coverage
Media Coverage
9/24 Does diversity training work? (Chronicle of Higher Education)
8/24 The hidden forces that shape our behavior. (National Public Radio / PBS)
5/23 Bias and diversity training for police works—temporarily. (Psychology Today)
3/23 APS 2023 Spence awardees on sharing minds, the development of learning, and implicit bias. (Association for Psychological Science Under the Cortex Podcast)
3/23 Diversity training: One size does not fit all. (Association for Psychological Science)
2/23 America’s most enduring myth. (Salon)
2/23 Police implicit bias training may impact belief, but not behavior, WashU study finds. (St.Louis Public Radio)
2/23 Commonly used police diversity training unlikely to change officers’ behavior, study finds. (WashU The Source)
2/23 Can police brutality be reduced through better training? Here’s what the evidence says. (Grid News)
1/23 Calvin Lai, PhD: Assistant professor and implicit bias researcher shares his academic and professional journey and offers practical advice. (Master’s in Psychology Podcast)
8/22 Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire. (The Economist)
5/22 Demographics, not bias, best predict traffic stops. (WashU The Source)
5/22 Finding out we all have hidden racial bias: Regardless of race: 5 years on. (CNA Television Broadcast)
3/22 Traffic stops and race: Police conduct may bend to local biases. (APS)
9/21 How to harness your own biases. (CBC)
6/21 Why many Americans can’t see the wealth gap between White and Black America. (FiveThirtyEight)
6/21 Why ineffective diversity training won’t go away. (BBC)
5/21 Disrupting the impacts of
implicit bias. (The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine)
5/21 5 strategies to infuse D&I into your organization. (Harvard Business Review)
4/21 What unconscious bias training gets wrong…and how to fix it. (The Guardian)
3/21 How Racist Am I? (Vox)
2/21 To overcome unconscious bias, you must recognize that it’s deeply ingrained in your brain. (Prevention)
1/21 The bias of crowds: Beyond diversity training. (APS Observer)
11/20 Does diversity training work? (APA Podcast)
10/20 What works to reduce police brutality. (APA Monitor)
9/20 Can you train people to be less biased? (PBS)
8/20 Is it possible to rid police officers of bias? (BBC)
8/20 What do unconscious bias tests really reveal about racism? (New Scientist)
7/20 The problem with implicit bias trainings. (Business Insider)
7/20 Unconscious Bias: Facing the realities of racism. (CNN Television broadcast)
6/20 Activists want bias training for cops. The ADL provides it. But does it work? (Forward)
6/20 Can implicit bias training help cops overcome racism? (Popular Science)
6/20 Making people aware of their implicit biases doesn’t usually change minds. But here’s what does work. (PBS News Hour)
6/20 This video explains implicit bias using a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (Women’s Health)
5/20 What’s behind COVID-19 violence? (Global Health Now)
3/20 Can you change your unconscious biases? (Raconteur)
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