Mahzarin Banaji

Education and career

She was born and raised in Secunderabad to a Parsi family, where she attended St. Ann's High School. Her BA is from Nizam College and her MA in psychology from Osmania University in Hyderabad. In 1986, Banaji received a PhD from Ohio State University and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington. From 1986 to 2001 she taught at Yale University, where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. In 2001, she moved to Harvard University as Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology. She also served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2002 to 2008. In 2005, Banaji was elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. In 2009, she was named Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2016, the Association for Psychological Science named Banaji one of its William James Fellows, an award given to outstanding contributors to scientific psychology.

Current affiliations

Banaji is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 3, 8 and 9), and the Association for Psychological Science. She served as Secretary of the APS, on the Board of Scientific Affairs of the APA, and on the Executive Committee of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Banaji was President of the Association for Psychological Science in 2010–2011.

Banaji has served as Associate Editor of Psychological Review and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and co-edited Essays in Social Psychology for Psychology Press. She serves on an advisory board of the Oxford University Press on Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience. She has served or serves on the editorial board of several journals, among them Psychological Science, Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Social Cognition, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Third Millennium Foundation, among other organizations.

Banaji was Director of Undergraduate Studies at Yale and is now Head Tutor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. Among her awards, she has received Yale's Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence, a James McKeen Cattell Fund Award, the Morton Deutsch Award for Social Justice, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 1999, her work with R. Bhaskar received the Gordon Allport Prize for Intergroup Relations. Her career contributions have been recognized by a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association in 2007 and the Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology in 2008.

Research and theory

With Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, she maintains an educational website, Project Implicit, designed to create awareness about unconscious bias.

Banaji studies human thinking and feeling as it unfolds in social contexts. Her focus is primarily on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. In particular, she is interested in the unconscious nature of assessments of self and other humans that reflect feelings and knowledge (often unintended) about their social group membership (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, gender, class) that underlie the us/them distinction.

From such study of attitudes and beliefs of adults and children, she asks about the social consequences of unconscious thought and feeling. Banaji's work relies on cognitive/affective behavioral measures and neuroimaging (fMRI) with which she explores the implications of her work for questions of individual responsibility and social justice in democratic societies.

Major publications