About

Nour Kteily is the Kellogg Chair in Enlightened Disagreement and a Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University. He serves as co-director of the Dispute Resolution Research Center and the founding co-director of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. His expertise lies in negotiation, conflict resolution, and inter-group relations, with a focus on how social psychology tools can be used to investigate the emergence of conflict between groups in society and how to resolve it productively. His research considers the role of power and social hierarchy, examining how inequality exacerbates conflict across various contexts, including racial and ethnic group conflicts, political disputes, and international conflicts such as those in the Middle East. Professor Kteily's work has been published in leading academic journals and featured in major media outlets. He has received numerous awards recognizing his research and teaching, including the SAGE Young Scholar Award, the James Sidanius Early Career Award, and the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Kellogg Executive MBA program. He holds a B.Sc. with First Class Honors from McGill University and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Law
• Positive economics
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Narratives About Deported Migrants Who Served in the U.S. Military Reduce Animosity Toward Migrants in the United States

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2026-03-22

  article

  Animosity toward immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, has reached high levels in many parts of the United States. What can be done to counteract anti-immigrant hostility? One solution is to implement media interventions, which are uniquely positioned to reduce animosity. We thus conducted two studies to assess the efficacy of three media interventions to reduce anti-immigrant attitudes. In Study 1 ( N = 2,050), we conducted an intervention tournament and found that one video was particularly effective at reducing anti-immigrant hostility and support for anti-immigrant policies, especially among Republicans. This video shared the story of undocumented immigrants who served in the U.S. military but were subsequently deported due to their legal status. In Study 2 ( N = 3,000), we replicated these findings among nationally representative partisan voters. These results suggest that a simple media intervention has the power to improve attitudes toward undocumented immigrants across the political spectrum.

  PublisherDOI

• ResearchBox 3336, 'Overestimating The Social Costs of Political Belief Change', https://researchbox.org/3336

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-05

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Box title: 'Overestimating The Social Costs of Political Belief Change' Reference: Trevor Spelman; Abdo Elnakouri; Nour Kteily; Eli J Finkel, 'Overestimating the Social Costs of Political Belief Change', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology10.1037/pspi0000516Note: this backup was created automatically by a ResearchBox bot

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Migrant Narratives on Anti-Migrant Attitudes

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-25

  other1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Overestimating the social costs of political belief change.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2026-02-02

  article

  ] of .87). These inflated expectations, which are associated with a greater likelihood of self-censoring dissenting views, may reflect a concern that dissent will signal greater group disloyalty than it actually does. Indeed, a brief intervention prompting individuals to reflect on their past loyalty to the group reduced this concern and was associated with more accurate expectations about ingroup reactions to their dissenting belief change. By examining the social forces that suppress dissent within political groups, this work offers insight into how to reduce conformity pressures and promote more open political discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Twitter Condemnation Study

  2026-01-05

  other1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Twitter Condemnation Study

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-06

  otherSenior author
  Publisher

• ResearchBox 3336, 'Overestimating The Social Costs of Political Belief Change', https://researchbox.org/3336

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-05

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Box title: 'Overestimating The Social Costs of Political Belief Change' Reference: Trevor Spelman; Abdo Elnakouri; Nour Kteily; Eli J Finkel, 'Overestimating the Social Costs of Political Belief Change', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology10.1037/pspi0000516Note: this backup was created automatically by a ResearchBox bot

  PublisherDOI

• Beliefs about what disadvantaged groups would do with power shape advantaged groups’ (un)willingness to relinquish it.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-05-01

  articleSenior author

  = 4,077), one of which was a registered report, we tested two possible causal pathways that might explain this relation: (a) "Meta-Dominance Beliefs → Opposition to Black Empowerment" and (b) "Opposition to Black Empowerment → Meta-Dominance Beliefs." We found evidence in support of the "Meta-Dominance Beliefs → Opposition to Black Empowerment" pathway, but not for the latter Opposition to Black Empowerment → "Meta-Dominance Beliefs" pathway. We discuss our findings' implications for theories of hierarchy maintenance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Social Dominance Orientation: The Motivational Basis of Intergroup Inequality

  2025-04-18 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Group-based hierarchies govern much of social life, from relations between ethnic groupsto those between nation-states. We review three decades of research on social dominance orientation (SDO), or individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality. We show that SDO functions as the motivational basis of intergroup inequality, demonstrating this through examples of our research on its meaning, significance, and etiology. Our work has developed the conceptualization of SDO and shown that it drives hierarchy maintenance (vs. challenge) in myriad ways, functioning as the ideological glue that guides individuals’ hierarchy-regulating cognition across contexts. Our work further suggests that SDO arose as an adaptive orientation to help humans navigate social hierarchies, building on understandings of hierarchical social arrangements even in preverbal infants, and exhibiting variation that is to a substantial degree genetically heritable. Still, as predicted by social dominance theory twenty-five years ago, SDO levels are flexibly adapted to the affordances of particular social contexts and a group’s hierarchical position therein. Throughout, we identify outstanding questions for future research in which SDO exhibits its potency and relevance as the motivational basis of multilevel accounts of intergroup inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Our colonial hangover? Blatant dehumanization plays a role in support for contested cultural traditions.

  Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology · 2025-08-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  OBJECTIVES: Ethnic miming, or impersonating stereotypical caricatures of marginalized groups, remains popular despite years of protests. Previous studies highlight that individual differences in ideological orientations predicting a range of intergroup attitudes-namely, social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)-also predict support for ethnic miming. We propose that blatant dehumanization of the target groups is an underlying mechanism that helps to further explain why support for ethnic miming is stronger among individuals higher in SDO and RWA. Studies from the Netherlands (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2) provide support for this notion. METHOD: = 298; Study 2), the majority of whom identified as part of the dominant ethnic group (82% ethnically Dutch, Study 1; 76% White American, Study 2). We used both mediation and cluster analyses to test our hypotheses. RESULTS: The mediation analyses reveal indirect effects from each of SDO and RWA to support for ethnic miming via blatant dehumanization. Additionally, the cluster analyses reveal that although some individuals who support ethnic miming have relatively egalitarian attitudes, others have attitudes that arguably reflect a sense of cultural superiority and preference for cultural dominance (i.e., high SDO, RWA, and blatant dehumanization). CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that a sense of cultural superiority and preference for cultural dominance helps to explain why support for ethnic miming persists in both cultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emile Bruneau

  87 shared

• Jonas R. Kunst

  University of Oslo

  54 shared

• Christopher D. Petsko

  51 shared

• Ryan Lei

  50 shared

• Arnold K. Ho

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  39 shared

• Jim Sidanius

  Harvard University

  34 shared

• Jennifer Sheehy‐Skeffington

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  25 shared

• Kurt Gray

  24 shared

Awards & honors

• SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality…
• James Sidanius Early Career Award from the International Soc…
• Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Co…
• Gordon Allport Prize in Intergroup Relations from the Societ…
• Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Paper Award (twice) from…