People

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.

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. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.