Jennifer Eberhardt

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.

Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies.

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.

The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training.

She has also provided directions for future research in this domain and brought attention to mistreatment in communities due to biases.

After graduating from Beachwood High School, she received her BA from the University of Cincinnati in 1987.

She then attended Harvard University where she received her MA in 1990 and PhD in 1993.

She is married to Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford University.

Eberhardt and Banks were elementary schoolmates who reconnected at Harvard.

They currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area with their three sons.

From July 1993 to July 1994, Eberhardt was a postdoctoral research associate in the Social and Personality Psychology Division at the University of Massachusetts.

Here, she conducted research on stereotyping and inter-group relations.

She was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, from September 1994 to June 1995, where she researched the impact of stereotype threat on academic performance.

From July 1995 to June 1998, Eberhardt worked as an assistant professor at Yale University in the Department of Psychology and the Department of African Studies and African-American Studies.

In September 1998, she accepted a teaching position at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor.

In May 2005, she was appointed as an associate professor, and at some point she became a full professor.

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.

Through SPARQ, Eberhardt demonstrates the consequences of racial associations in criminal justice, education and business.

Eberhardt and her colleagues developed research that introduced alternative approaches to considering race and ethnicity.

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.

The study's findings revealed that those who believed racial differences arise due to biological differences differed from those who looked at race as a social construct.

Those who view racial differences as biologically influenced are, according to this study, less likely to express interest in interracial relationships.

These people were also at a higher risk of promoting race-based stereotypes, were less likely to set aside inequalities and defended these inequalities as a product of innate racial differences.

When people perceive racial differences as biologically determined, they create strict barriers between themselves and racial out-groups.

This impacts the well-being of members of historically disadvantaged racial groups.

Golby and Eberhardt's research focused on why humans are more likely to recognize people in their own race over those in another race.

African-American and European-American subjects looked at images of unfamiliar African-American and European-American faces while getting fMRI scans.

There was 1.5 times more activation in the right hemisphere of the brain, specifically the fusiform face areas (FFAs), when looking at same-race faces.

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.

This demonstrates that own- and other-race faces stimulate differential activation in the FFAs, however it does not explain why activation for same-race faces takes place in right side of the brain and memory encoding takes place in the left side of the brain.

Eberhardt has authored Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, was a recipient of the 2014 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, been named one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Eberhardt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of five children.

She was raised in Lee–Harvard, a predominantly African-American middle-class neighborhood.

When she was twelve, her family relocated to Beachwood, Ohio, where she graduated from Beachwood High School.

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.

The two neighbourhoods differed in terms of resources and opportunities despite their close proximity.

She noticed that she and her non African-American classmates experienced life differently, such as her father and brothers being pulled over more frequently than other residents.

This further increased her interest in racial inequality and changed her approach to understanding the world.