Intergroup Relations Lab

People

Director
	John F. Dovidio, Ph.D. Kirtland 307B john.dovidio@yale.edu Website		John F. Dovidio, Ph.D. is the Carl Iver Hovland Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Yale University, and the director of the Intergroup Relations Lab. His work centers around issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals. He explores both conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) influences on how people think about, feel about, and behave toward others based on group membership. He continues to conduct research on aversive racism, a contemporary subtle form of prejudice, and on techniques for reducing conscious and unconscious biases. His research further explores how the bias of health care providers and perceptions by members of traditionally disadvantaged groups of being stigmatized affects medical interactions, decisions, and outcomes.

Postdocs
	Milan Obaidi, Ph.D Dunham 322F milan.obaidi@yale.edu		Milan Obaidi is a Sasakawa postdoctoral research fellow. Milan’s research interests are cross-disciplinary and intersect various areas of psychology (social, personality and political) and political science. Milan incorporates insights from several research traditions with the aim of identifying how different factors that lead to political violence and extremism relate to each other and interact in complementary ways. Milan earned his PhD from European University Institute, Florence, and was a visiting researcher at Jim Sidanius’ lab during his PhD.
	Ivy Onyeador, Ph.D. Dunham 322C ivy.onyeador@yale.edu Website	CV	Ivy Onyeador is an NSF SBE postdoctoral research fellow. Ivy’s research examines how dominant and subordinate group members reason about group-based discrimination and disparities. Through her research program, she aims to identify potential threats to cohesion and design interventions to increase people’s understanding of and willingness to address inequality. Ivy received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation examined negative consequences of framing racial discrimination in terms of implicit bias rather than explicit bias. Ivy received her B.S. in Psychology with distinction from Yale University.
	Elif Ikizer, Ph.D. elif.ikizer@yale.edu Website		Elif Ikizer is a postdoctoral research associate. Elif’s research is on the link between stigma and culture and the unintended consequences of simple psychological interventions. Elif received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. She investigated the stereotypes towards nonnative accented speakers in her dissertation. Elif received her M.A. from Koc University and her B.Sc. from Bogazici University, both in Istanbul, Turkey.
	Thomas O'Brien, Ph.D Dunham 322F thomas.obrien@yale.edu	CV	Thomas O’Brien is a Research Scholar at the Justice Collaboratory of Yale Law School and a member of the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab. His primary research is reconciliation between authorities and communities and he is currently examining strategies that police can use to build cooperation with communities. He has also conducted experimental research examining how knowledge about the public opinion of national outgroups can shape support for policies towards that national outgroup. He received his PhD in Psychology with concentrations in the Psychology of Peace and Violence and Quantitative Methods at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Graduate Students
	Katie Duchscherer Dunham 328A katie.duchscherer@yale.edu	CV	Katie Duchscherer is a fifth-year Ph.D. student. Before beginning her studies at the Intergroup Lab, she received her BA in psychology from Stanford University. In general, Katie is interested in the processes behind stereotyping and identity formation, and features of online interaction that promote prosocial behavior and community formation. She is currently researching the effects of self-expressive and persistent pseudonyms, compared to anonymity, on helping behavior and norm enforcement in online forum interactions. She is also investigating the moderating effects of group identity, social context, and personality differences on these behavioral outcomes.
	Fabian Schellhaas Dunham 328C fabian.schellhaas@yale.edu Website		Fabian is a doctoral candidate working with Jack Dovidio. His interests focus around intergroup bias and the psychological processes that facilitate and impede action for social change. In his main research, Fabian is conducting a comprehensive meta-analysis of the relationship between inclusive social identities and outgroup attitudes, as well as lines of primary research in a variety of cultural contexts examining how inclusive identities can undermine collective efforts for social change. Beyond academia, Fabian is passionate about socially useful behavioral/data science, and has tackled people-related questions in research roles at Google in San Francisco, and the Behavioural Insights Team in London. Prior to coming to Yale, Fabian received degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Groningen.
	Bennett Callaghan Dunham 328A bennett.callaghan@yale.edu Website	CV	Bennett Callaghan is a member of the Yale Intergroup Relations and Connecticut Social Interaction labs. His research interests broadly relate to the psychology of social class, both in terms of how it is experienced (on a personal and cultural level) and how it is implicated in collective and inter-group processes. Some research investigates how class influences people’s responses to political messages or candidates. Other research investigates how individuals communicate and perceive signals of social class or social status and how such signals influence other’s behavior. Bennett received his BA in Forensic Psychology, with a minor in English, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York) and spent two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to Yale.
	Natalie Wittlin, MS, MPhil Dunham 328A natalie.wittlin@yale.edu Website	CV	Natalie Markowitz Wittlin is a fifth-year doctoral student whose research focuses on beliefs about gender, sexuality, and physical appearance. In one line of work, for example, she employs methods from the study of gender essentialism to uncover implicit categorizations of transgender women and men. In another, she investigates how the knowledge that someone is transgender influences memory for that person’s physical appearance. Natalie earned her B. A. from Barnard College at Columbia University with a major in psychology and a minor in political science. Prior to beginning graduate school, she worked in the fields of education, public health, and psychology.
	Julian Rucker Dunham 328D julian.rucker@yale.edu	CV	Julian Rucker is a second-year doctoral student. He is broadly interested in investigating the psychological factors shaping perceptions of, reactions to and motivations to address intergroup inequality across a number of societal domains (e.g., criminal justice, education, health). For example, one of his main lines of research examines how lay beliefs about the interpersonal or structural nature of racism shape subsequent responses, after exposure to racial disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System. Before coming to Yale, Julian received a BA in Psychology, with a minor in Sociology, at The University of Texas at Austin and received a MA in Psychology from Northwestern University.
	Natalie Daumeyer Dunham 328D natalie.daumeyer@yale.edu Website	CV	Natalie is a fourth year graduate student at Yale. She graduated in 2014 from Miami University with a B.A. in Psychology and a B.A. in Individualized Studies with a focus in Social Justice Issues: Power and Privilege in Society. More recently, she received a M.A. in Psychology at Northwestern, before moving to Yale with her primary advisor, Jennifer Richeson. Her research interests include stereotyping, prejudice, intersectionality, and intergroup relations. Particularly, Natalie is interested in exploring ways in which attributing discrimination to implicit compared to explicit bias influences how people make sense of the discrimination, with specific regard to accountability and support for punishment and reform.
	Xanni Brown xanni.brown@yale.edu		Xanni is a second year doctoral student in the social psychology program. She majored in social studies at Harvard University, where she also worked in the Sidanius intergroup psychology lab. Xanni’s research interests include intergroup relations, inequality, empathy, and political psychology, with a current focus on the political and social implications of threat over changing racial demographics. Her non-research interests include campaign finance reform, mountains, and rugby.

Lab Affiliates
	Silvia Abad-Merino, Ph.D. silvia.abadmerino@yale.edu		Silvia Abad-Merino, Ph.D., is a professor of education at the University of Córdoba, Spain. She has received several national awards for academic excellence, and prestigious scholarships that allowed her to join research teams at the University of Oxford and at Ulster University, among others. Her working and research experience have been very broad, and she has had the benefit of working with interdisciplinary teams in Europe, the U.S., Eurasia and Latin America. Her research has been primarily focused on the following areas: the study of how subtle forms of bias maintain structural disadvantage; the analysis of reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare settings; and the evaluation of inequitable outcomes of different vulnerable populations in educational settings.
	Karolina Hansen, Ph.D. karolina.hansen@psych.uw.edu.pl Website	CV	Karolina Hansen is an assistant professor at the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and a research affiliate at Yale. She received her PhD in psychology from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. She was a visiting assistant in research at Yale University, a Marie Curie fellow at the Initial Training Network “Language, Cognition, & Gender” at the University of Bern, and an assistant researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are in the fields of social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural psychology, and include topics such as attitudes about language and accents, stereotyping, gender-fair language, linguistic biases, and cross-cultural differences in social cognition. Currently, she studies accent attitudes in Poland, Germany, and the US.
	Hyeyoung Shin, Ph.D. hyeyoung.shin@yale.edu		Hyeyoung Shin is a Research Associate at the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Maryland College Park. Her research integrates social psychology and cross-cultural psychology focusing on intergroup prejudice. She investigates why people have prejudice and how the processes that underlie these biases differ between countries and cultures. She examined cultural differences between Northern European-heritage and East Asian cultures in stigmatization of non-normative groups, the role of economic competitiveness in prejudice toward immigrants and foreign workers, and social and biological intergroup hierarchy beliefs. She also examined country-specific prejudice toward immigrants and foreign workers in the US, Germany, and Australia. Her goal is to illuminate general and culture-specific processes in prejudice and intergroup relations and to develop theory-based interventions to reduce prejudice.
	April Bailey Dunham 328C april.bailey@yale.edu Website	CV	April H. Bailey is researcher and lecturer in statistics. Her research integrates social cognition with intergroup relations. A main, but not exclusive, focus of her research has been on gender. In one line of work, she investigates the androcentric tendency to default to thinking of people as men. Her work also addresses other related gender and racial biases, intersectionality, person perception more generally, nonverbal behavior, moral psychology, and essentialism. April received her PhD from Yale University in 2019—advised by Jack Dovidio and Marianne LaFrance.
	Jonas Kunst, Ph.D. Dunham 322D jonas.kunst@yale.edu Website		Jonas R. Kunst is a postdoc with a primary interest in acculturation, political and social psychology. His research investigates processes and power dynamics underpinning intercultural attitudes and behavior between majority- and minority-group members living within diverse societies. Jonas earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oslo and spent parts of his graduate studies at Jim Sidanius’ lab where he remains an associated fellow.