RESEARCH

Stereotypes can shape how we see other people.

Chris is an experimental social psychologist with expertise in person perception. At the broadest level, his research examines how stereotypes—or the collective beliefs we harbor about members of different social groups—influence the way that we perceive other people. Chris’s primary line of research focuses on intersectional stereotyping. His secondary lines of research focus on stereotyping in organizational and political contexts.

Intersectional Stereotyping

Person Perception at Work

Political Stereotyping

Intersectional Stereotyping

Chris’s primary line of research is on intersectional stereotyping, or how it is that we stereotype other people in light of the multiple, intersecting identity groups to which they belong (for example, in light of their race and their gender). This line of work has led to a variety of discoveries: that learning that someone is gay can change the way we perceive their race, for example; or that when engaging in stereotyping, most people tend to home in on just one identity at a time, depending on the context.

Much of this work is organized around a theoretical model Chris developed called the lens model of intersectional stereotyping, which explains how particular social identities become focal lenses through which we perceive others.

Representative Work

Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping →

Racial stereotyping of gay men: Can a minority sexual orientation erase race? →

Intersectional prejudice in context: Do naturalistic background images moderate implicit bias? →

Louis Round Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill seen across the lawn on a summer afternoon

Person Perception at Work

Much of Chris’s recent work examines questions related to person perception in organizational contexts. What unites this line of work is the idea that the psychological processes he studies—the mechanisms by which stereotypes influence social perception—can help us to understand whom we are likely hire, how much we pay our employees, whom we select as leaders, and the like.

Representative work

Are leaders still presumed White by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited →

Beyond the motherhood penalty: Evidence of a parenthood boost in workplace evaluations →

Evidence of a perceptual error that precludes people from recognizing cross-race sponsorship in professional settings. →

Political Stereotyping

A third line of Chris’s research examines political stereotyping, or how it is that our stereotypic views toward others are inflected through the lens of our own political leanings. Generally speaking, this line of research suggests that our political identities very often seem to color the way that we perceive other people—from our perceptions of ethnic minorities to our perceptions of political outgroup members.

Representative work

Political (Meta-) Dehumanization in mental representations: Divergent emphases in the minds of liberals vs. conservatives. →

Race and white rural consciousness →

Blatant dehumanization in the mind’s eye: Prevalent even among those who explicitly reject it? →

Full Research Statement

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