The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded social psychologist Jennifer Richeson, PhD, a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. Each year the awards go to 20 to 25 top creative thinkers, including scientists, historians, poets and novelists, artists and composers. The "no strings attached" funding, released over five years, supports "people pushing boldly to change, improve and protect our world--to make it a better place for all of us," says Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.

Richeson, a Northwestern University associate professor of psychology and African-American studies, studies the behavioral and cognitive consequences of prejudice and racial stereotyping. Specifically, she explores the dynamics of interracial interaction between minority and majority groups. Among her key findings so far: Interracial interactions spur stress and require people to exercise heightened self-control to avoid expressing prejudice. Summoning such self-control drains cognitive resources, reducing people's effectiveness on other cognitive tasks, Richeson has found using such research tools as brain imaging, surveys, implicit cognitive processing measures and self-reports.

Richeson, a faculty fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research, also studies effects of increasing workplace diversity on minorities' job evaluations. For example, she's found that whites who have positive interactions with blacks in superior, high-status roles--for example, a white assistant working for a black executive--are less biased than those who have had negative interactions.

In other research, Richeson has found that people's feelings about different racial groups can affect how they categorize others into by race. She's shown that white participants take longer to categorize admired blacks such as Michael Jordan as black than disliked ones such as O.J. Simpson. But these same participants take longer to categorize disliked whites such as Timothy McVeigh as white than admired ones such as Tom Hanks.

Using the MacArthur grant, Richeson and her research team plan to further explore intergroup relations and to identify pitfalls in current approaches to combating prejudice.

"We'll continue to do research on interracial interactions, including work trying to map patterns of neural activity in response to members of different racial groups onto the behaviors individuals display during actual interracial interactions," she says. "We are also beginning to investigate physiological responses to subtle forms of racial bias, from the perspective of racial minorities."

Richeson received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 2000. Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty, she was a visiting fellow at the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University and an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College.

—E. Packard

For more information on the MacArthur Fellows Program, visit www.macfound.org.

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