Located at the University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business, HIGHER Lab (PI: Dr. Sa-kiera “Kiera” T.J. Hudson) is a social psychology research laboratory investigating how intergroup social hierarchies are formed, how they are maintained, and how they interact. To answer these questions, we focus on the role of i) empathetic and spiteful emotions in supporting intergroup harm, ii) group stereotypes in the experience and perception of prejudice, iii) motivated reasoning in justifying unequal societal conditions.

In the first line of research, our lab studies the role of emotions in maintaining hierarchy and inequality. Extant research primarily highlights the importance of empathy in promoting pro-social intergroup behaviors, however, lacking empathy is often insufficient in explaining the deeply harmful intergroup behaviors seen across social conflicts. Rather, we study feeling schadenfreude (i.e., feeling positively in response to another person’s pain) and the absence of empathy as related, but distinct, dual processes explaining of group-based oppression. Moreover, we study social dominance orientation– a measure of the extent to which individuals prefer group-based inequality– as a relevant antecedent to empathy, schadenfreude, and intergroup conflict more broadly.

In the second line of research, our lab examines stereotyping as a mechanism of intergroup hierarchy maintenance. We examine how descriptive (what groups are like) and prescriptive (what groups should be like) stereotypes at the intersection of multiple social identities. Specifically, we expose the role of prototypicality biases– assuming that people are male (androcentrism), White (Eurocentrism), and straight (heterocentrism)– in forming stereotypes of intersectional targets.

Finally, we study the hierarchy-enforcing myth that social progress is natural and inevitable consequence of the passage of time, thus leading individuals to erroneously believe that there has been significantly more social progress in achieving equality than is supported by evidence.