Jennifer A. Richeson (born September 12, 1972) is an American
social psychologist
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the rela ...
who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and
African-American studies at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
. In 2015, she was elected to the
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
.
Richeson was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered (or re-chartered) in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST w ...
(PCAST).
Early life
Richeson was raised in a predominantly white
middle-class area of
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
, the daughter of a businessman and a school principal. She has described herself as an indifferent and underachieving student in her childhood. Leaving the predominantly white elementary school and the shadow of her gifted older brother, David, Richeson blossomed after moving to schools with a more diverse student population. She entered a predominantly black middle school and all-female high school. Her realization that advanced classes were disproportionally taken by non-
African-Americans
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of enslav ...
motivated her to become a
student activist
Student activism or campus activism is work by students to cause political, environmental, economic, or social change. Although often focused on schools, curriculum, and educational funding, student groups have influenced greater political e ...
. She has cited these early experiences as important in developing her interest in
identity
Identity may refer to:
* Identity document
* Identity (philosophy)
* Identity (social science)
* Identity (mathematics)
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''Identity'' (1987 film), an Iranian film
* ''Identity'' (2003 film), ...
and interracial interactions.
Education
Richeson completed a Sc.B. in psychology with honors at
Brown University in 1994. She earned her M.A. and
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in
social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the ...
at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
in 1997 and 2000, respectively.
Academic career
Richeson became an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...
in
Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover is a town located along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. As of the 2020 census, its population was 11,870. The town is home to the Ivy League university Dartmouth College, the U.S. Army Corps of En ...
, in 2000. She was a visiting fellow at
Stanford University's Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 2005, she moved to
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
in
Evanston, Illinois
Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, ...
, where she held appointments in the Department of Psychology and Department of African American Studies (by courtesy) and was a faculty fellow of the
Institute for Policy Research and the Center on Social Disparities and Health.
She was appointed as the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair between 2013 and 2016.
She joined the faculty at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
in 2016, where she is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Communication Lab.
She is endeavoring in the translation of empirical research into the practical application of knowledge. For example, she is currently the faculty fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University and the affiliated external scholar of the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality in the
City University of New York. She also serves as an executive committee member on the Societal Experts Action Network, which is part of the
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Richeson also writes opinion pieces and commentaries on topics related to race. As a former fellow of the
OpEd Project, she has written articles published in different newspapers or magazines, including
The Hill,
The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
,
The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
,
Huffington Post,
Foreign Affairs,
Ebony
Ebony is a dense black/brown hardwood, coming from several species in the genus '' Diospyros'', which also contains the persimmons. Unlike most woods, ebony is dense enough to sink in water. It is finely textured and has a mirror finish when ...
,
The American Prospect
''The American Prospect'' is a daily online and bimonthly print American political and public policy magazine dedicated to American modern liberalism and progressivism. Based in Washington, D.C., ''The American Prospect'' says it "is devoted t ...
, and
U.S. News & World Report. Recently
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
published an essay of hers about the “enduring narrative” of the “mythology of racial progress” in the United States that she argues would distort to way we perceive reality. She is planning to develop the theme into a book-length manuscript.
Professional honors
The
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
honored Richeson with the
for her creativity and sophistication in examining the mechanisms of
prejudice
Prejudice can be an affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classification of another person based on that person's per ...
,
discrimination, and
intergroup relations Intergroup relations refers to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psycholog ...
using behavioral and
neuroimaging
Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Incr ...
methodologies. In 2006, Richeson was awarded a
MacArthur Fellowship
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...
, also known as a "genius grant," for her work in "highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and in the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives."
In April 2015, she was named a
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...
. Later the same month, she was elected a member of the
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
,
one of the only two new black members in 2015, according to ''
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
''The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education'' is a former academic journal, now an online magazine, for African Americans working in academia in the United States.
The journal was established as a quarterly in 1993 by Theodore Cross, a "champio ...
''. She is also an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association,
Association of Psychological Sciences,
Society of Experimental Social Psychology The Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) is a scientific organization of social scientists founded in 1965 with the goal of advancing and communicating theories in social psychology. Its first chairperson was Edwin P. Hollander.Holland ...
,
Society for Personality and Social Psychology
The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is an academic society for personality and social psychologists focused on promoting scientific research that explores how people think, behave and interact. It is the largest organization o ...
, and
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
.
She has received other awards for research accomplishments. In 2019, she got the
Mamie Phipps Clark
Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 - August 11, 1983) was an African-American social psychologist who, along with her husband Kenneth Clark, focused on the development of self-consciousness in black preschool children. Clark was born and raised i ...
and
Kenneth B. Clark
Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 24, 1914 – May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. T ...
Distinguished Lecture Award from
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
and the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She also received an honorary doctorate from her Alma mater, Brown University, in the same year.
SAGE Publishing
SAGE Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent publishing company founded in 1965 in New York by Sara Miller McCune and now based in Newbury Park, California.
It publishes more than 1,000 journals, more than 800 books ...
and the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at
Stanford University honored Richeson with the 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award in 2020.
She received a
Carnegie Foundation Senior Fellowship in the same year.
Research
Richeson is recognized for her work examining the psychological phenomena of
cultural diversity
Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures, as opposed to monoculture, the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures, akin to cultural evolution. The term "cultural diversity" can also refer to having different c ...
, social group memberships, dynamics of race and
racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonis ...
, and the course of interracial interactions.
She and her research laboratory at Yale work on three broad themes related to cultural diversity, namely, the perception and reasoning about intergroup inequality, the navigation of diverse environments, and the experiences of discrimination.
Perception and reasoning about inequality
Richeson and her lab revealed the myth and narratives in society about racial progress as something that can be automatically and inevitably achieved. In examining the factors sustaining such narratives, they found that a belief in a just world and racially diverse social network was associated with the overestimation of economic and racial equality between Black and White individuals. Results from other endeavors of her lab suggested that the exposure to inequalities may motivate the support of policies in redressing inequalities in society.
Regarding how the individual responds to the information about inequalities, Richeson revealed two factors that shape our response, our beliefs about the nature of racism and the consciousness of the consequence of racism. She and her team found that individuals with a more structural understanding of racism were more likely to respond to the information about inequalities and support policies in reducing the inequalities. People engaged in discrimination that brought from implicit or unconscious belief, on the other hand, maybe deemed less accountable for their own actions.
Navigation of diverse environments
In the prevailing notion about the states marching towards a “
majority-minority
A majority-minority or minority-majority area is a term used to refer to a subdivision in which one or more racial, ethnic, and/or religious minorities (relative to the whole country's population) make up a majority of the local population.
Ter ...
” nation, Richeson and the lab have explored the anticipated threat that may bring to the current status of White individuals. Richeson's more recent work on the effects of demographics on political attitudes – in which studies of politically independent white Americans revealed increasingly conservative political attitudes with increasing awareness of declining white population share – has been widely reported in the media as significant for the future of American national politics.
Richeson's research makes use of neuroimaging methodologies in examining the dynamics of interracial interactions. Her work in this area has been described as sophisticated and as moving past descriptive uses of imaging to test real hypotheses. Several of her most influential papers describe
fMRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area ...
-based findings related to increased
cognitive control
In cognitive science and neuropsychology, executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and suc ...
exerted during interracial interactions by white people whose
implicit association test
The implicit-association test (IAT) is a controversial assessment intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes hel ...
results indicate racial bias. Although self-regulatory effort in avoiding the expression of prejudice is cognitively demanding, it is found effective in creating a positive environment for interracial interactions.
Experiences of discrimination
Richeson and her lab built on this premise that taking a third-person or distanced point of view when encountering
stressor
A stressor is a chemical or biological agent, environmental condition, external stimulus or an event seen as causing stress to an organism. Psychologically speaking, a stressor can be events or environments that individuals might consider demandin ...
s can effectively reduce its negative effects on
mental and
physical health
Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organi ...
. They suggesting a redemption narrative that can enable individuals to alleviate the negative impact of discrimination.
Richeson also examined the experience of group-based discrimination and its impact on the relations with members of other stigmatized groups. It is found that the salience of discrimination would bring more positive relations with groups within the same dimension of identity (e.g., among racial minorities), yet it would also bring about negative attitudes with groups in a different dimension of identity (e.g., racial versus
sexual minorities
A sexual minority is a group whose sexual identity, sexual orientation, orientation or practices differ from the majority of the surrounding society. Primarily used to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, or non-heterosexual individuals, it can al ...
). Richeson and her lab discovered ways to bridge the cross-identity dimensions by recognizing the similarities of the discrimination encountered by different stigmatized groups. She believed that it could be helpful in promoting the stigma-based solidarity, and in turn, reducing the negative attitudes among stigmatized groups.
References
External links
The OpEd Project– "an initiative to expand public debate and to increase the number of women in thought leadership positions."
{{DEFAULTSORT:Richeson, Jennifer
21st-century American psychologists
American women psychologists
African-American psychologists
Social psychologists
American women scientists
Stanford University fellows
Dartmouth College faculty
MacArthur Fellows
Northwestern University faculty
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Brown University alumni
Harvard University alumni
Living people
1972 births
Social Science Research Council
American women academics
21st-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
20th-century African-American women
Members of the American Philosophical Society