Benedek Kurdi, Assistant Professor, Psychology
The study of attitudes (evaluations of social entities along a positive–negative continuum) has been at the center of social psychological research since at least the 1930s. When and how attitudes change informs both accounts about fundamental processes of social learning and memory and translational endeavors of intervening on pernicious social group biases. Attitude change has traditionally been studied with a focus on short-term change, at the level of individuals, and using the experimental method. However, largescale continuous data collection via the Project Implicit educational website (http://implicit.harvard.edu/) now makes it possible to investigate how social group attitudes have changed in the long term, at the level of societies, and in response to cultural inputs. This research uses data from 1.2 million+ participants across 33 countries, drawn from the openly available Project Implicit International Dataset (Charlesworth, Navon, et al., 2023), to ask whether and how explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) attitudes toward five social group targets (age, body weight, sexuality, skin tone, and race) changed around the world between 2009 and 2019. This talk will address overall trends, with specifics related to age, period, and cohort effects. Also included: cross-country variability, findings for the same time window in the United States, and key demographic comparisons – with conclusions about the possibility of positive societal change.
Benedek Kurdi’s research addresses the immense power and the surprising limitations of our minds in adaptively responding to new information given a lifetime of learning. He examines learning in the context of basic social processes, specifically, the ordinary decisions we make every day that are critical to our well-being and even survival: our evaluations of and beliefs about other people. He relies on a combination of traditional online and laboratory experiments as well as computational approaches, in order to uncover the basic mechanisms involved in how we acquire and update our impressions of individuals, especially against the backdrop of information about their social group memberships, such as gender, sexual orientation, age, race, and ethnicity.
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