Faculty Directors
Jennifer Eberhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, studies stereotyping, prejudice, and stigma. Her recent work examines how people associate race with crime, and how these associations affect criminal justice. For instance, she shows that the more stereotypical a Black American defendant’s facial features, the harsher his sentencing. She also examines the dehumanization of Black Americans in contemporary society and its implications for justice and education. Jennifer leads several SPARQ Special Projects, including Be the Donor and Evaluating PUP.
Hazel Rose Markus, Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, studies how gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, region, and nation shape—and are shaped by—individual’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions. Her recent studies of first-generation college students, for instance, show how universities’ emphases on middle-class values and practices undermine working-class students’ performance. She is also exploring different correlates of health and wellbeing in the United States and Japan.
Executive Director
Alana Conner, PhD, studies, writes, and consults about improving the health and well-being of diverse populations around the world. A former senior editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Vice President of Content for The Tech Museum, she earned her doctorate in cultural psychology from Stanford and her postdoctoral certificate in health psychology from UCSF. She is a coauthor (with Hazel Rose Markus) of Clash! How To Thrive in a Multicultural World.
Research Scientist
Sarah Lyons-Padilla is a cultural psychologist whose research examines gender bias, intercultural conflict, and motivations behind terrorism. She earned her doctorate in social and industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Maryland in College Park, where she worked on experimental and field research that brought her to Germany, Japan, and across the US.
Research Associate
Amrita Maitreyi, lab manager for Dr. Hazel Markus and Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, also works as a research associate at SPARQ. Amrita graduated from Tufts University and is passionate about chihuahuas.
Faculty Affiliates
Jennifer Aaker, General Atlantic Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business, is a social psychologist best known for her research on time, money, and happiness. She also studies the transmission of ideas through social networks, the power of story in decision making, and how to build global brands across cultures. She is a coauthor of The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change and The Power of Stories.
Geoffrey Cohen, Professor of Psychology, James G. March Professor in Education and Business, studies how people maintain and protect their identities, and then uses that knowledge to design interventions that help close racial and gender achievement gaps in education. He also examines the psychology of closed-mindedness, discrimination, and intergroup conflict, and the psychological processes that drive people to take risks with their health. Dr. Cohen is the Research Director of the SPARQ Be the Donor Project.
Alia Crum, Assistant Professor of Psychology, is SPARQ's Director of Health. She studies how changes in subjective mindsets can alter objective reality through behavioral, psychological, and physiological mechanisms. For example, her work explores how placebos elicit healing by changing people's expectations and physiological processes. Dr. Crum aims to understand how mindsets can be consciously and deliberately changed through intervention to improve organizational and individual performance, physiological and psychological well-being, and interpersonal effectiveness.
Carol Dweck, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology, bridges developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology to examine how people construct and use self-conceptions that guide their behavior. Her bestselling book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success documents how adopting a so-called “growth mindset” and understanding people as capable of change and growth can drive improvements in education, business, parenting, and relationships.
James J. Gross, Professor of Psychology, is a leading researcher in the areas of emotion and emotion regulation. Dr. Gross has authored over 300 publications, and is a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.
Mark Lepper, Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology, studies the strategies and techniques of expert tutors, and applies his findings to the design of educational programs. He is particularly interested in the detrimental effects of superfluous social controls, including rewards, and in strategies for enhancing children’s intrinsic interest in learning. This interest has led him to study cultural differences in the effects of choice and filial piety on academic performance.
Robert MacCoun is a social psychologist and public policy analyst who has published numerous studies on a variety of topics, including illicit drug use, drug policy, judgment and decision-making, citizens’ assessments of fairness in the courts, social influence processes, and bias in the use and interpretation of research evidence by scientists, journalists and citizens.
Dale Miller, Class of 1968/Ed Zschau Professor in the Graduate School of Business and Professor of Psychology, explores the impact of social norms on behavior, the role that justice considerations play in individual and organizational decisions, and the conditions under which individuals and organizations abandon one course of action to pursue another.
Benoît Monin, Associate Professor of Psychology and Organizational Behavior, examines how people address threats to the self in interpersonal situations: How they avoid feeling prejudiced, how they construe other people's behavior to make their own behavior look good, how they affirm a threatened identity, and how they resent the goodness of others when it makes them look bad. He studies these issues in the context of social norms, the self, and morality, broadly defined.
Hayagreeva Rao, Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources, studies collective action within organizations and in markets. His research and by implication, his teaching, revolves around scaling up mobilization, innovation, and talent in organizations.
Lee Ross, Professor of Psychology, Ross studies the psychological biases that drive interpersonal and intergroup conflict. He has applied his findings in diplomacy and public peace processes in the Middle East, the Caucuses, and Northern Ireland, as well as in discussions about global warming, health care, social security choices, and the academic challenges facing minority students and women in science.
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and a Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy) at Stanford. He focuses on evidence-based management, the links (and gaps) between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, and organizational performance.
Gregory Walton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, examines the nature of self and identity, often in the context of academic motivation and achievement. He is interested in social factors relevant to motivation, in stereotypes and group differences in school achievement, and in social-psychological interventions to raise achievement and narrow group differences, especially in education. At SPARQ, he serves as Director of Education and helped launch the inaugural Solutions Catalog.
Jamil Zaki, Assistant Professor of Psychology, studies emotions in social contexts. In particular, he is interested in why, when, and how people empathize with each other, and the effects that empathy has on social behaviors such as altruism. He is further interested in leveraging psychological insights to improve the way people give, receive, and benefit from empathy.
Philip G. Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which revealed how easily situational forces can push ordinarily “good” people to do evil deeds. He now focuses on this phenomenon’s flipside: what situational forces can drive people to be heroes? He also studies time perspective, shyness, terrorism, madness, and evil. drzimbardo@gmail.com
Postdoctoral Fellows
Rebecca C. Hetey, PhD, is a recent graduate of the Ph.D. program in social psychology at Stanford. She studies the association between race and crime, perceptions of the actors and institutions that make up the criminal justice system, and the antecedents and consequences of thinking about race as biological, rather than socially constructed. A native of Queens, New York, she earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale University.
Jason Okonofua, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University who works with Dr. Gregory Walton and Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt on a project that investigates psychological barriers to reintegration (return to home and school) for juvenile offenders. Jason’s research program emphasizes the on-going interplay between processes that originate among teachers (how stereotyping can influence discipline) and students (how apprehension to bias can incite misbehavior) to examine causes for disproportionate discipline according to race.
Doctoral Fellows
Nick Camp is a doctoral student in social psychology at Stanford. He was drawn to social psychology as a way to take big questions and make them answerable. His research examines the links between the social world and perception--how identities, motives, and environments bleed into how we see and make sense of what's around us.
Rebecca Carey is a doctoral student in Social Psychology at Stanford. Her interest is in the sociocultural shaping of relationships. She seeks to understand how culture can shape how people understand and behave in relationships, and how this in turn can help address real world problems and societal issues.
Eleanor Chestnut is a doctoral student in developmental psychology at Stanford. Broadly, she is interested in how people implicitly communicate information to each other through language. Her work with SPARQ focuses specifically on ways to reduce implicit gender bias.
Alyssa Fu is a social psychology doctoral student at Stanford. She examines how culture shapes motivation, well-being, and other psychological functions. Her work shows the importance of considering how contexts affect human behavior when addressing real-world questions.
Camilla Griffiths is a doctoral student in social psychology at Stanford. She is interested in how people learn about racial identity and racial bias through their interactions with people and institutions, with a particular focus on policing and education. She grew up living mostly abroad, but completed her Bachelor’s degree in Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia.
Kyla Haimovitz is a doctoral student in developmental psychology at Stanford. Her research examines psychological factors that facilitate learning and achievement. Her work focuses on how parents', teachers', and managers' beliefs and behaviors shape the development of motivation and self-regulation in students and employees.
Lauren Howe is a fifth year doctoral candidate in social psychology and the Shaper Family Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. She work on projects related to improving outcomes in patient-physician interactions, trust in experts, science communication, fear of rejection, and the importance of social connection.
Kari Leibowitz is a doctoral student in social psychology at Stanford.She is interested in understanding how best to promote mindsets that increase psychosocial well-being, with a particular emphasis on understanding compassionate mindsets in various populations. Her research with SPARQ focuses on understanding and shaping mindsets about health.
Sal Lempert is a doctoral student in social psychology at Stanford, where she studies how public perceptions of race affect policy decisions. Originally from the Bay Area, she earned her bachelor's degree in neuroscience and behavior from Columbia University.
L. Taylor Phillips is a fifth-year doctoral student in the organizational behavior program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She investigates how people think about and respond to inequality, hierarchy, and privilege, and how their beliefs about race and diversity impact behaviors and perceptions during group interactions. She earned her B.A. in psychology and human biology at Stanford.
