About

Mina Cikara is the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University, serving in the Department of Psychology and directing the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab. Her research focuses on how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She primarily investigates how group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that enable people to see others as human and to empathize with them. Her work employs a wide range of tools, including standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI, and psychophysiology, to examine failures of empathy, dehumanization, and misunderstanding between groups. She is also interested in the behavioral consequences of these processes, such as discrimination, conflict, and harm. Mina Cikara received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2010 and completed an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Prior to her current position at Harvard, she was an Assistant Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 2012 to 2014. Her research interests include intergroup bias, emotion, cognitive and affective neuroscience, social cognition, and intergroup relations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Social psychology
• Public relations
• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Law
• Engineering
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Political economy
• Clinical psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Virology

Selected publications

• Who goes with whom: The multidimensional cognitive map of U.S. political coalitions

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-14

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Polarization debates often presume two sorted “camps” in American politics, yet we lack a map of how citizens perceive the coalitions that constitute these camps—perceptions that structure partisan animus, information processing and vote choice, and political behavior. Across five studies using historical and novel survey data, we inductively discover this cognitive map. Analyses reveal a stable, asymmetric, tripartite structure: a unified conservative coalition alongside a fractured liberal wing composed of distinct “Ideological” and “Demographic” coalitions. This structure is organized along two dimensions: a primary ideological axis capturing left–right conflict, and a secondary common fate axis distinguishing groups perceived as motivated by tangible, widespread welfare concerns versus narrower “special” interests. Critically, tangible-priority perceptions predict partisan hostility towards groups, beyond groups’ perceived ideological and partisan extremity. This perceptual architecture explains the entanglement of social-group stereotypes with partisanship, reconciles rising affective polarization with stable demographic sorting, and identifies limits on persuasion and mobilization.

  Publisher

• Who goes with whom: The multidimensional cognitive map of U.S. political coalitions

  2026-04-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Polarization debates often presume two sorted “camps” in American politics, yet we lack a map of how citizens perceive the coalitions that constitute these camps—perceptions that structure partisan animus, information processing and vote choice, and political behavior. Across five studies using historical and novel survey data, we inductively discover this cognitive map. Analyses reveal a stable, asymmetric, tripartite structure: a unified conservative coalition alongside a fractured liberal wing composed of distinct “Ideological” and “Demographic” coalitions. This structure is organized along two dimensions: a primary ideological axis capturing left–right conflict, and a secondary common fate axis distinguishing groups perceived as motivated by tangible, widespread welfare concerns versus narrower “special” interests. Critically, tangible-priority perceptions predict partisan hostility towards groups, beyond groups’ perceived ideological and partisan extremity. This perceptual architecture explains the entanglement of social-group stereotypes with partisanship, reconciles rising affective polarization with stable demographic sorting, and identifies limits on persuasion and mobilization.

  PublisherDOI

• A lethal incident during an intergroup encounter in bonobos

  Scientific Reports · 2026-03-23

  articleOpen access

  Although neighbouring bonobo communities often display tolerance and cooperation when associating together, aggression is also commonly observed during intergroup encounters. Here, we describe an observation at the Kokolopori research site (DRC) in which a coalition of individuals from the neighbouring Kokoalongo community aggressed an adult female from the Ekalakala community. This happened during an ongoing intergroup encounter that had begun earlier as the two communities travelled and foraged together. Shortly after the attack, the 52-day-old infant of the attacked female was carried by two immatures of Kokoalongo. The infant showed signs of distress before being taken by an adult Kokoalongo female, the mother of the immatures. The infant died the following day, and the adult female continued to carry the corpse for two additional days. This unique case of infant acquisition by unrelated out-group individuals immediately following aggression against the mother underscores that bonobo intergroup encounters can have lethal outcomes. These events highlight the complexity and unpredictability of intergroup dynamics in this species.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals' beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total <em>N</em> = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives-achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented-impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants' representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants'. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

  PublisherDOI

• Who goes with whom: The multidimensional cognitive map of U.S. political coalitions

  2026-04-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Polarization debates often presume two sorted “camps” in American politics, yet we lack a map of how citizens perceive the coalitions that constitute these camps—perceptions that structure partisan animus, information processing and vote choice, and political behavior. Across five studies using historical and novel survey data, we inductively discover this cognitive map. Analyses reveal a stable, asymmetric, tripartite structure: a unified conservative coalition alongside a fractured liberal wing composed of distinct “Ideological” and “Demographic” coalitions. This structure is organized along two dimensions: a primary ideological axis capturing left–right conflict, and a secondary common fate axis distinguishing groups perceived as motivated by tangible, widespread welfare concerns versus narrower “special” interests. Critically, tangible-priority perceptions predict partisan hostility towards groups, beyond groups’ perceived ideological and partisan extremity. This perceptual architecture explains the entanglement of social-group stereotypes with partisanship, reconciles rising affective polarization with stable demographic sorting, and identifies limits on persuasion and mobilization.

  PublisherDOI

• Childhood violence exposure and social information processing in young adults: Does relationship with the perpetrator matter?

  2025-08-31

  articleOpen access

  Humans are generally biased to show implicit favoritism for in-group over out-group members, but developmental experiences may alter this process in important ways. Prior work has elucidated associations of family (i.e., in-group) violence exposure in childhood with risk for internalizing symptoms through weakened implicit favoritism for novel in-group members. The present study probes whether childhood violence exposure influences implicit bias and psychopathology differentially depending on the participant’s relationship with the perpetrator (i.e., in-group vs. out-group member) at the time of exposure. We administered a minimal group assignment paradigm and implicit association test to 455 young adults aged 18-25. Young adults who experienced out-group violence in childhood showed stronger implicit in-group favoritism compared to those who experienced in-group or no violence. Implicit out-group favoritism was associated with increased alcohol use. Early-life experiences may shape innate preferences for novel in-group vs. out-group members in ways that have lasting implications for mental health.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Childhood violence exposure and social information processing in young adults: Does relationship with the perpetrator matter?

  2025-09-25

  articleOpen access

  Humans are generally biased to show implicit favoritism for in-group over out-group members, but developmental experiences may alter this process in important ways. Prior work has elucidated associations of family (i.e., in-group) violence exposure in childhood with risk for internalizing symptoms through weakened implicit favoritism for novel in-group members. The present study probes whether childhood violence exposure influences implicit bias and psychopathology differentially depending on the participant’s relationship with the perpetrator (i.e., in-group vs. out-group member) at the time of exposure. We administered a minimal group assignment paradigm and implicit association test to 455 young adults aged 18-25. Young adults who experienced out-group violence in childhood showed stronger implicit in-group favoritism compared to those who experienced in-group or no violence. Implicit out-group favoritism was associated with increased alcohol use. Early-life experiences may shape innate preferences for novel in-group vs. out-group members in ways that have lasting implications for mental health.

  PublisherDOI

• Judgment of crowds as emotional increases with the proportion of black faces

  Scientific Reports · 2025-10-08

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Decades of research have sought to characterize how racialization affects the evaluation of faces. However, research has mostly focused on the perception of single faces. In the current project we address this gap by examining whether racialization affects crowd perception, even in the absence of perceived differences at the single-face level. In Experiments 1-2, participants viewed crowds of faces expressing different degrees of happiness or anger and different ratios of lighter-skinned faces (racialized as White) and darker-skinned faces (racialized as black). A higher proportion of Black faces led to a greater likelihood of perceiving the crowd as emotional. Experiment 3 confirmed this effect was not solely driven by the contrast between White and Black faces within a crowd, as crowds composed of entirely Black faces were more likely to be evaluated as emotional than crowds of White and Black faces. Using hierarchical drift diffusion models, we compared potential mechanisms and found that Black faces expressing emotions weighed more heavily than White faces in judging whether a crowd was emotional. These results shed light on an important way in which racialization impacts judgments of collective emotion.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Post-Outcome Valence, Not Emotion Prediction Errors, as a Primary Predictor of Behavior

  Collabra Psychology · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What can feelings tell us about human behavior that we cannot know from directly observable states alone? From a reinforcement learning perspective, adaptive behavior is calibrated based on deviations from predicted states, called prediction errors (PEs). This perspective has typically focused on outcomes in the environment (e.g., monetary or food rewards, actions, etc.), relatively de-emphasizing agents’ internal feeling states. Heffner and colleagues (2021) complemented this focus by additionally probing deviations from predicted feelings (i.e., emotion PEs). In four experiments using two-dimensional valence-arousal grids, participants reported how they expected to feel about their predicted outcomes and how they subsequently felt about the actual outcomes. In this context, “outcomes” refers to monetary offers in social settings (i.e., variations of the Ultimatum Game). Measuring outcome PEs alongside emotion PEs made it possible to use both PE types as joint predictors of choice behavior (i.e., reactions to offers). When accounting for outcome PEs as well as predicted emotion, emotion PEs remained significantly predictive of choice behavior. Moreover, the association between emotion PEs and choice behavior was altered in participants at risk for depression. Based on these associations, the authors claimed that emotion PEs not only explain variance in choice behavior beyond outcome PEs but even guide socially adaptive behavior. Here, we revisit the role of self-reported emotions in behavior. Our follow-up analyses revealed post-outcome valence—how good or bad participants felt after an outcome—to be a better predictor of behavior, and thus a stronger candidate than emotion PEs for “guiding” it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Place-related representations in setting the stage for empathy

  Cognition · 2025-09-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  What makes people experience varying degrees of empathy? Common accounts emphasize interpersonal attributes, including victims' group membership or social proximity to observers. Here we elucidate a distinct process: imagining the scenes surrounding victims. Although imagination has been shown to moderate empathy, the relative importance of its representational components is unknown. Using fMRI ( N = 48), we identified activation maps preferentially associated with imagining places and persons, respectively. When participants imagined misfortunes happening to individuals in specific places, the place and person maps jointly predicted affective empathy, and, less consistently, prosocial behavior. Crucially, place-preferential activation was at least as predictive as person-preferential activation. Results were robust to several group-, participant-, trial-level, and covariate-adjusted analyses. Moreover, place-preferential activation itself was most strongly predicted by person liking, beyond place-related ratings. Our data are consistent with social affinity potentiating place imagination, which in turn increases empathy, above and beyond person imagination. These findings challenge person-centric views of empathy by suggesting that place-related representations are central to empathy and socially contingent. • Prominent views and intuition hold that empathy is about people. • But the composition of how we mentally represent others' misfortunes is unknown. • Brain data suggest place- and person-related representations are similarly predictive of empathy. • Place-related representations themselves were more pronounced for liked others. • These data challenge exclusively person-centric views of empathy and its biases.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Engineering opportunity: Manipulating choice architecture to attenuate social bias

  NSF · $512k · 2017–2023

• NIH Grant F32HD06808601A1

  NIH · $48k · 2012

• Learning-based motivation of intergroup aggression

  NSF · $451k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Vasiliki Fouka

  18 shared

• Susan T. Fiske

  Princeton University

  17 shared

• Jeffrey Martin Lees

  Princeton University

  17 shared

• Joshua S. Cetron

  Harvard University

  17 shared

• Onyul Haque

  Harvard University

  16 shared

• Patrick Mair

  16 shared

• Marius C. Vollberg

  University of Geneva

  15 shared

• James N. Druckman

  University of Rochester

  11 shared

Labs

• InterGroup Neuroscience LaboratoryPI

  The InterGroup Neuroscience Laboratory is dedicated to understanding the neural basis of social behavior and its disorders.

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  2012

• M.A., Psychology

  Harvard University

  2009

• B.A., Psychology

  University of Belgrade

  2006

Awards & honors

• NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship