Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt (born January 1, 1965) is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.
[2] She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice.
[9][10] Eberhardt credits her interest in race and inequality on her family's move from the predominantly African-American working-class neighbourhood of Lee-Harvard to the white suburb of Beachwood.
[9][1] Eberhardt is also the co-director and faculty co-founder of Stanford's SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions) program.
This center at Stanford brings together many industry leaders, researchers and well known faces in society to inspire cultural changes using insights from the behavioral sciences.
[13] In 2008, she published a study that sought to examine how the variations in beliefs regarding the root of racial differences can impact social interactions.
[15][16] Another finding was that memory recognition was greater for recognizing same-race faces in European-Americans which showed higher activation in the left fusiform cortex and the right hippocampal and parahippocampal regions.
[21] In a related 2008 study, Eberhardt and her colleagues conducted an analysis on printed newspaper articles regarding Caucasian and African-American convicts in line for the death penalty.
[23] During the analysis of the newspaper articles, the researchers' main focus was on detecting "ape imagery" (this included characterizing a person as a beast, hairy, wild).
[22] The research done by Eberhardt demonstrated not only the mistreatment of African-American detainees, but also the lack of civil rights available to members of other lower-status groups who are often misjudged as aggressors.
[24] In 2012, Eberhardt and colleagues studied how racial stereotypes can affect a juror's perception of the legal distinction between a juvenile and adult criminal offender.
[26][27] In another study in 2014, Eberhardt and Hetey (a Stanford University colleague) examined how just the mere exposure of racial disparities can impact an individual's support for harsh criminal justice policies.
The recommendations create a model that spans four categories: data analysis, policies and practices, training, and community engagement.
[33] In 2016, Okonofua, Walton, and Eberhardt ran a meta-analysis on past research literature examining how social-psychological factors play a role in the structure of racial disparities in teacher-student relationships.
Findings in the research suggest pervasive negative stereotypes may give rise to mistrustful relationships between racially stigmatized students and teachers.
[34] As a result, such teachers' interactions with students through frequent labelling can potentially produce a never-ending cycle of increased punishment and misbehaviors.
Therefore, future interventions should aim to solve psychological barriers in order to reinforce positive teacher-student relationships rather than placing the majority of emphasis on teaching social skills, or prescriptive rules.