Politics and Intergroup Relations Lab (PIRL)

People

 

Lab Director

  
Eric Knowles is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. He has been at NYU since 2012, before which he was on the faculty of the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Eric received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. His research focuses on the interplay between people’s politics, group identities, and intergroup attitudes.
[CV] [Google Scholar Page]
[Department Profile] [Personal Twitter]

Postdoctoral Fellows

  

Eric Shuman received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Groningen and Hebrew University in 2022. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow working with Eric Knowles and at Harvard Business School, working with Amit Goldenberg. His research focuses on intergroup relations and interventions to advance social change towards greater equality. More specifically, his work focuses on identifying the effects and effectiveness of various types of collective action by the disadvantaged and understanding the psychological roots of resistance to social change among the advantaged group.

Primary Students

  
Mao Mogami is a sixth-year doctoral student. She graduated with a B.S. in Psychology from UMass Amherst in 2017. One of her main research interests is understanding the extent to which people use histories of oppression when making social judgments in the present. 

Her website | LinkedIn
Fiona Adjei Boateng is a fourth-year doctoral student from Ghana. She graduated with a B.A in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Colgate University, Hamilton NY in 2019. Fiona is mainly interested in understanding how and why people perceive particular leaders to be effective and charismatic, as well as how one’s gender, race and cultural background plays a role in others’ perceptions of their leadership ability.
Melissa Vega is a third-year doctoral student in the NYU Abu Dhabi Global PhD Program, working with Dr. Jaime Napier and Dr. Eric Knowles. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Northwestern University in 2015 and her M.A. in Psychology from NYU in 2020. She is broadly interested in the interplay between social identities, ideologies, and sociopolitical climates, and how said interplay impacts how we think about diversity and social inequality.

Email: mv1691@nyu.edu
Nick Fendinger is a second-year doctoral student working with Dr. Eric Knowles. He graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in English literature from Miami University (OH) in 2019. Prior to starting graduate school, he worked as a laboratory manager at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Dr. Keely Muscatell. His research focuses on how social class shapes our attention and ability to infer the internal states of others (theory of mind). 

Email: nfendinger@nyu.edu 

​

Affiliated Students

  
Riana Brown is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in NYU’s Social Psychology program. Her research interests include studying reactions to and perceptions of societal inequality by both advantaged and disadvantaged group members and how having multiple social identities affects reactions to inequality.
Mike Berkebile-Weinberg is a fifth-year doctoral student in NYU’s Social Psychology program. He received his B.A. in Psychology from University of California, San Diego in 2014. His current research interests include how economic trends impact intergroup relations, and how collective representations of stereotypes form and evolve within natural language.
Michelle Lee is a fifth-year doctoral student at NYU’s social psychology program. She received her B.A. in Literature with a minor in Film Production at NYU in 2012 and attended Columbia University’s post-baccalaureate psychology program 2014-2016. Her current research interests include how racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. influences perceptions of allyship and coalition-building, political attitudes, and policy support.
Eduardo J. Rivera Pichardo is a fifth-year doctoral student in the social psychology program at NYU. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Universidad de Puerto Rico in 2015, and his M.A. in Political Philosophy from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2017. His research focuses on the psychological consequences of colonialism/coloniality including its effects on well-being, acculturation, inter-group relations, collective memories, and ideological formation.
Ilayda Orhan is a second-year doctoral student in the Social Psychology program working primarily with Dr. Mo Craig. She received her BS in Cognitive Science from Yale University in 2021. Her thesis project explored the mechanisms which underlie ingroup favoritism in minimal group settings. She is interested in understanding different social groups’ individual and collective motivations in upholding power structures, and wants to use this understanding to progress towards a more just society. She is a firm believer in the value of social psychology for the betterment of intergroup relations and for a decrease in social inequality. Outside of the lab, she enjoys hosting/attending cozy game nights and a cup of Turkish coffee in the presence of great company.
Jeannine Alana Bertin is a third-year doctoral student in NYU’s Social Psychology problem. She received her B.A. in Psychology from McGill University in 2019. Her current research interests include how social hierarchy and oppression is maintained and perpetuated through individual and group psychological processes, with a particular interest in the role of stereotypes.

RAs

  
Scarlett Gu is an undergraduate senior majoring in psychology and history. She is broadly interested in clinical psychology.
Ice Lou is a second-year Master’s student at NYU in the General Psychology program. She received her B.A in psychology from College of Arts and Science, New York University in 2022. Her research interest is emotion reading and social class in all age groups.

Shannon Li is an undergraduate junior majoring in Psychology. Her research interests include human perception, the behaviors and effects of different interpersonal relationships, and the way that inequality shapes experiences. She’s also interested in exploring Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

 Alumni

  

Shahrzad Goudarzi received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU in 2022. She is an Assistant Professor of Political Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. She is broadly interested in how we feel, think, and act in the context of vast socioeconomic disparities. Her overarching goal is to understand the interrelation between structural and individual factors that promote (or hinder) greater equality.
Pia Dietze received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at NYU in 2019. Pia’s research examines how disparities in the economic conditions of the lives of different social class groups shape their social attitudes, attention, and appraisals. Pia also investigates the processes that shape how people react and respond to economic inequality, with a focus on identifying pathways to motivate more inequality-mitigating attitudes and behavior. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine.
Sarah DiMuccio received her PhD in Social Psychology at NYU in 2021. Sarah’s research examines how masculinity impacts men’s attitudes and behaviors in a variety of domains (politics, racial identification, at work). She currently works as a Senior Research Associate at Catalyst – a global nonprofit organization – where she does research to better understand the barriers to men’s engagement in gender equity and the factors that discourage them from confronting sexism in the workplace.
 
Frequent Collaborators 
 
Rosalind M. Chow, Carnegie Mellon University
Steven J. Frenda, New School for Social Research
Brian S. Lowery, Stanford University
Rebecca L. Schaumberg, New York University
Elizabeth P. Schulman, Brock University
Miguel M. Unzueta, University of California, Los Angeles