Tessa Charlesworth

About

Tessa Charlesworth is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on understanding how and why thoughts (beliefs) and feelings (attitudes) change over time, with particular attention to biases about social groups and the processes that lead to shifts towards or away from prejudice. Her work adopts a multi-level and multi-method approach to explore change within individuals, organizations, and broader social collectives. Her research has been published in leading outlets such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Harvard Business Review, and American Psychologist, and has been featured in popular press including Scientific American, NPR, The New York Times, and Forbes. Professor Charlesworth earned her B.A. in Psychology, summa cum laude and phi beta kappa, from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University, where she received the dissertation award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, conducted at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Her research has been recognized with awards such as the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science and the Best Dissertation Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Echoes of Culture: Relationships of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes With Contemporary English, Historical English, and 53 Non-English Languages

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2024-06-14 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Attitudes are intertwined with culture and language. But to what extent? Emerging perspectives in attitude research suggest that cultural representations in language are more related to implicitly measured (vs. explicitly measured) attitudes, and that such relationships persist across history and diverse languages. We offer a comprehensive test of these ideas by correlating (a) attitudes toward 55 topics (e.g., Rich/Poor, Dogs/Cats, Love/Money) from ~100,000 U.S. English-speaking participants wi…

  PublisherDOI

• The Stigma Stability Framework: An Integrated Theory of How and Why Society Transmits Stigma Across History

  Social and Personality Psychology Compass · 2025-03-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Psychologists have long treated stigma—the labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination of social groups—as a static process. Yet recent evidence has shown that, in fact, contemporary indicators of stigma (e.g., racial prejudice, violence against Jewish people) are strongly correlated with historical measures of stigmatization (e.g., slavery, anti‐Jewish pogroms, respectively), even over timespans of centuries. What explains this striking persistence? Here, we see…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Content, Structure, and History of English Trait Words

  2025-07-17 · 1 citations

  article

  Traits are the currency of personality and social psychologists; they help us understand andrepresent both real and perceived differences between people and groups. Here, we advance ourunderstanding of traits by revealing new insights into their content, structure, and evolution usinglarge language models and human raters. Across four studies, we: (a) introduce one of the mostcomprehensive trait lists to-date (2,847 trait words); (b) establish normative human ratings ofthese traits (from N = 3,0…

  PublisherDOI

• Who is American? A comprehensive analysis of the American = White/Foreign = Asian stereotype (2007–2023)

  Scientific Reports · 2025-01-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Against the backdrop of increasing ethnic diversity in the U.S., we replicate, extend, and challenge previous examinations of the American = White/Foreign = Asian stereotype in the largest sample to date (N = 666,623 respondents) over 17 years (2007-2023). Six key findings emerged. First, a robust American = White association emerged on implicit (Cohen's d = 0.50) and explicit (Cohen's d = 0.51) measures. Second, the strength of this effect varied by respondents' race/ethnicity with implicit ste…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• International stability and change in explicit and implicit attitudes: An investigation spanning 33 countries, five social groups, and 11 years (2009–2019)

  2024-05-16 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) social group attitudes can change has been a central topic of psychological inquiry over the past decades. Here we take a novel approach to answering these longstanding questions by leveraging data collected via the Project Implicit International websites from 1.4 million participants across 33 countries, five social group targets (age, body weight, sexuality, skin tone, and race), and 11 years (2009–2019). Bayesian…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Benedek Kurdi

  38 shared

• Mayan Navon

  29 shared

• Nicole Lofaro

  University of Florida

  28 shared

• Frank Kaiyuan Xu

  27 shared

• Anthony G. Greenwald

  27 shared

• Brian A. Nosek

  Center for Open Science

  27 shared

• Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Harvard University

  27 shared

• Aylin Caliskan

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Rising Star Award, Association for Psychological Science
• Best Dissertation Award, Federation of Associations in Behav…

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