| 1 | Name: | Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji | |
| Institution: | Harvard University; Santa Fe Institute | ||
| Year Elected: | 2020 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 305 | ||
| Residency: | resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1956 | ||
Mahzarin Banaji is currently Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology of Harvard University, Senior Advisor to Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She earned her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1986. She taught at Yale University, including as Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology, before moving to Harvard University and the Santa Fe Institute. At Harvard she has held the titles of Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard College Professor; she was George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics, at the Santa Fe Institute. Mahzarin Banaji pioneered the science of automatic stereotyping. She developed with Greenwald a theory, rigorous evidence, and widely-used measure of implicit associations between social groups (e.g., gender, race) and evaluative valence. These rapid associations (ingroup = good, outgroup = bad) may contradict people’s conscious rejection of prejudice. Nevertheless, implicit association tests are reliable and valid, correlate with relevant neural activations (e.g., amygdala), and predict behavior—especially for politically sensitive issues—sometimes better than do explicit attitudes. Banaji’s recent work traces their origins to cultural exposure in childhood. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that immediate associations are under bounded control. Because individuals cannot reliably monitor bias, Banaji develops legal and ethical implications: social systems can better detect patterns of bias. Often unaware of bias, people may even justify a system biased against their own group. Through tireless public outreach, Banaji educates business, law, and education organizations about unconscious bias and its inadvertent waste of human capital. Mahzarin Banaji has won a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association in 2007 and William James Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science in 2016. She is a charter member of the American Psychological Society (now Association for Psychological Science), which she joined in 1988, was secretary from 1997-99, and was president from 2010-11. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2008), the British Academy (2015), and the National Academy of Sciences (2018). She authored (with A. Greenwald) Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people, 2016. Mahzarin Banaji was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |||