What We Learn from Where We Live

Description

Neil Lewis, Jr., an associate professor of Communication at Cornell University, will be giving a colloquium talk and Q+A for JHU Psychology and Brain Sciences and the SNF Agora Institute on April 16.

The United States has long been, and continues to be, a highly segregated society. When societies separate groups of people in the ways that we do in the U.S., that separation has not only economic, political, and sociological consequences, it also affects how people think and communicate about social issues and interventions to address them. In this talk, Lewis will share recent findings from his program of research that has been using the United States as a context to examine how patterns of segregation and other forms of social stratification seep into the mind and affect how people perceive and make meaning of the world around them. He will also discuss the consequences of those meaning-making processes for people's judgments, motivations, and decisions across multiple domains. Lewis will conclude with implications of this research for social scientific theories, and the practical application of those theories.