Dr. Mahzarin Banaji will deliver the 2017 Anderson Science Lecture. Dr. Banaji is currently the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. She also taught at Yale University where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology before transitioning to Harvard.
Dr. Banaji studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social contexts. Her focus is primarily on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. In particular, she is interested in the unconscious nature of assessments of self and other humans that reflect feelings and knowledge about their social group membership (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, class) that underlie the us/them distinction. Her recent book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People describes some of this work. She maintains an educational website designed to create awareness about unconscious biases in self-professed egalitarians.
Dr. Banaji has served as Associate Editor of Psychological Review and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and co-edited Essays in Social Psychology for Psychology Press. She currently serves on an advisory board of the Oxford University Press on Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Third Millennium Foundation among other organizations.
Among her awards, Dr. Banaji has received Yale's Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence, a James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, the Morton Deutsch Award for Social Justice, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her career contributions have been recognized by a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association and the Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology.
Dr. Banaji will present a campus-wide lecture on Thursday, March 30, 2017. The lecture is designed for a general audience and is free and open to the public.
