His work all serves the ultimate goal of understanding and reducing the injustice, human suffering, and disparities that arise from stereotyping and prejudice.

His work also serves as a bridge between basic, fundamental science and translational, applied intervention work: he leverages advances in basic knowledge about stereotype perpetuation to develop, test, and refine evidence-based interventions, most especially the bias habit-breaking training, which has been shown to be highly effective at creating lasting, meaningful changes related to bias and diversity.

[5][6] Whereas other researchers have argued that people have an accurate "gaydar" ability that enables people to visually identify whether someone is gay or straight, Cox and his colleagues argued that "gaydar" is simply an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay), and thereby serves the function of a legitimizing myth to reduce the normative stigma associated with stereotyping.

The researchers point out that past work arguing that people have accurate "gaydar" falls prey to the false positive paradox (see also the base rate fallacy), because the alleged accuracy discounts the very low base rate of LGB people in real populations, resulting in a scenario where the "accuracy" of gaydar reported in lab studies translates to high levels of inaccuracy in the real world.

[7] Dr. Cox is perhaps best known for his work in the development, testing, and dissemination of the bias habit-breaking training, an evidence-based diversity intervention.