Mahzarin Banaji

Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard, received her PhD from Ohio State University in 1986 and was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is an experimental psychologist who studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social contexts. She is interested in the sub-conscious nature of assessments of self and other human beings that reflect feelings and knowledge about social group membership. She brings a cognitive science and psychology perspective to existing SFI programs related to behavior and decision-making.

Banaji was elected fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, named Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychology Science, an organization of which she also served as President.  She also received the Carol and Ed Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology. Banaji published Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, with Anthony Greenwald in 2013.