Mahzarin R. Banaji

About

Mahzarin R. Banaji is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University and has served as the Harvard College Professor from 2014 to 2019. She studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in social context, with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Her research explores social attitudes and beliefs in adults and children, especially those rooted in group membership, and examines the implications of these processes for individual responsibility and social justice in democratic societies. Her current research interests include the origins of social cognition and applications of implicit cognition to improve individual decisions and organizational policies. Prior to her tenure at Harvard, Banaji taught at Yale from 1986 to 2002, where she was the Ruben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. Since 2002, she has held the position of Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, and has also served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as well as the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. She has been recognized as a fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was named Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and received the William…

Research topics

• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

  Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · 2021 · 249 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation,…

  DOI

• Gender Stereotypes in Natural Language: Word Embeddings Show Robust Consistency Across Child and Adult Language Corpora of More Than 65 Million Words

  Psychological Science · 2021 · 172 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  to systematically quantify gender stereotypes in language corpora that are unprecedented in size (65+ million words) and scope (child and adult conversations, books, movies, TV). Across corpora, gender stereotypes emerged consistently and robustly for both theoretically selected stereotypes (e.g., work-home) and comprehensive lists of more than 600 personality traits and more than 300 occupations. Despite underlying differences across language corpora (e.g., time periods, formats, age groups), r…

  DOI

• Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes III: <i>Long-Term Change in Gender Stereotypes</i>

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2021 · 134 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Gender stereotypes are widely shared “collective representations” that link gender groups (e.g., male/female) with roles or attributes (e.g., career/family, science/arts). Such collective stereotypes, especially implicit stereotypes, are assumed to be so deeply embedded in society that they are resistant to change. Yet over the past several decades, shifts in real-world gender roles suggest the possibility that gender stereotypes may also have changed alongside such shifts. The current project t…

  DOI

• Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2020 · 122 citations

  DOI

• ChatGPT as Research Scientist: Probing GPT’s capabilities as a Research Librarian, Research Ethicist, Data Generator, and Data Predictor

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-08-20 · 52 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  How good a research scientist is ChatGPT? We systematically probed the capabilities of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 across four central components of the scientific process: as a Research Librarian, Research Ethicist, Data Generator, and Novel Data Predictor, using psychological science as a testing field. In Study 1 (Research Librarian), unlike human researchers, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 hallucinated, authoritatively generating fictional references 36.0% and 5.4% of the time, respectively, although GPT-4 exhibit…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH057672

  NIH · $1.2M · 2005

Frequent coauthors

• Brian A. Nosek

  Center for Open Science

  132 shared

• Anthony G. Greenwald

  116 shared

• Benedek Kurdi

  73 shared

• Elizabeth A. Phelps

  New York University

  42 shared

• Jason P. Mitchell

  Harvard University Press

  39 shared

• William A. Cunningham

  31 shared

• John C. Gore

  Vanderbilt University

  28 shared

• Tessa Elizabeth Sadie Charlesworth

  Northwestern University

  27 shared

Labs

• Group and Intergroup RelationsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  1986

• B.A., Psychology

  University of Delhi

  1981

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists
• Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political…
• William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellect…

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Daniel L. Schacterh-181
• Matthew K. Nockh-126