She is Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She and her colleague Eliot Smith received the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues's Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize[2] in recognition of the theoretical contributions of their 1997 paper, Intergroup relations: Insight from a theoretically integrative approach.
After completing her BA and MA, she spent a year (1979) working with Willem Doise and Gabriel Mugny as a research assistant at the University of Geneva, Switzerland,[1] which culminated in an edited volume titled The social development of the intellect.
[5] Mackie subsequently attended Princeton University, where she completed her PhD in social psychology in 1984 under the supervision of Joel Cooper.
Over her career, Mackie authored many articles and book chapters on social influence and intergroup relations.