Background

Through understanding the forces that shape bias, my research is grounded in the desire to better understand the mechanisms that stymie progress toward diversity and inclusion in organizations. I adopt a micro-level approach to investigate the roles of social categories, like race and gender, and motivated beliefs, like social dominance ideologies, in shaping a variety of diversity-related phenomena. My primary area of interest lies in understanding racial and gender dynamics I am particularly interested in biases in evaluations and perceptions of underrepresented group members. Within this stream, I often adopt an intersectional framework to shed light on the interactive effects of race and gender on the stereotypes, prototypes, and attitudes people hold about employees. In my dissertation, I integrate intersectional theory with theorizing on stereotype content to explore how Black women's gender and racial non-prototypicality--relative to White women and Black men--affects both their believability and the financial remedy they receive when they allege discrimination. In a second line of work, I seek to understand motivated beliefs and their role in shaping a variety of biases, such as (dis)belief in science or exaggerated judgments of outgroup presence in organizations.