Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Stanford University

Jennifer L. Eberhardt is the William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior as well as a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She is one of the foremost scholars on racial biases in perception, cognition, and behavior within the United States. Her innovative research, particularly on white Americans’ perception of white and Black faces, has provided invaluable insights into the mechanisms behind racial perceptions and sheds light on why certain biases persist. In her work on looking “deathworthy,” she has found that Black defendants with stereotypically Black facial features are more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death than those perceived as less stereotypical. Her brain imaging studies show that the fusiform face area (an area of the brain implicated in face processing) is less responsive when white Americans view Black faces as opposed to white faces. In laboratory experiments, she’s shown that people associate Black faces with crime in milliseconds. In field studies, she’s used large language models to analyze police body-camera footage, demonstrating how officers speak less respectfully to Black drivers and predicting which stops escalate. She has also put her findings into action, working for decades with police departments, community members, and city leaders to improve police interactions with the public. Eberhardt’s work is characterized by the originality of her perspectives and by the thoughtfulness of her approach. Her scholarship has deepened our understanding of human perception, bias, and prejudice in important ways.

Diane L. Hughes

New York University

Over the last quarter century, Diane L. Hughes has become the pre-eminent scholar in one of the most influential constructs in developmental psychology: racial socialization. A professor of applied psychology at New York University Steinhardt, Hughes developed the most widely used and widely cited framework for studying how parents convey messages about race, ethnicity, and racism to their children. The framework not only conceptualized processes that are endogenous to ethnic/racial minority families in response to racist structures and settings,; it acknowledged that families exposed to racism are not defined by these experiences but rather develop ways to cope and reject such characterizations and teach their children to do the same. Moreover, the framework shows that not all families engage in a uniform racial socialization, nor should they. Her concept of “prep for bias” explored whether children could be protected from the negative effects of racial discrimination if their parents prepared them for it. She found that “prep for bias” indeed helps children of color cope with insidious and overt structural racism. Hughes’s outstanding work on racial socialization has been the foundation of numerous research programs, including basic and intervention studies, across multiple generations of scholars.