Jennifer Eberhardt

Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt (born May 29, 1965) is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. 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.

In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Early life Eberhardt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is 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. This further increased her interest in racial inequality and changed her approach to understanding the world. 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. 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. 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.

Criminal justice

Eberhardt's research demonstrated how the automatic effect of implicit racial stereotypes impacts one's visual processing. A series of studies focusing on priming were conducted, specifically priming individuals with images related to crime. The intention was to see whether individuals would focus on White or Black faces when cued for crime. The study showed that people and officers specifically focused more on Black faces. The next study focused solely on officers who were separated into two groups, those who were primed for crime and those who weren't. They were presented with a picture of a Black or White suspect and were asked to complete a memory task where they had to identify the suspect in a lineup with other suspects of the same race. Some lineups had suspects with highly stereotypical features of each respective race, whereas others had less stereotypical facial features. Crime-primed officers who viewed a Black suspect misremembered the suspect with someone who had more stereotypical Black features; but crime primed officers who saw a White suspect were less likely to identify a less stereotypical White suspect and more likely to associate it with a more stereotypical Black face. This also introduces future directions for research such as the cognitive accessibility of primed information.

In a related 2008 study, Eberhardt and her colleagues conducted an analysis on printed newspaper articles regarding Caucasian and African-American convicts in line for the death penalty. This study was rooted in the notion that African-American males are frequently wrongly accused, misjudged and wrongfully remembered as aggressors. During the analysis of the newspaper articles, the researchers' main focus was on detecting "ape imagery" (this included characterizing a person as a beast, hairy, wild).

In 2012, Eberhardt and colleagues studied how racial stereotypes can affect a juror's perception of the legal distinction between a juvenile and adult criminal offender. Participants read non-homicide case studies depicting either a Black or White juvenile offender. They found White Americans were more likely to support severe sentences when they read case studies depicting a Black juvenile offender than when the offender's race was changed to White. This was because white offenders' behaviour was more likely to be attributed to youthful indiscretion while Black offenders were more likely to be perceived as having the maturity and criminal intentions of adults.

In another study in 2014, Eberhardt and Hetey (a Stanford University colleague) examined how just the mere exposure of racial disparities can impact an individual's support for harsh criminal justice policies. White participants were split into two groups, in group one they watched a video clip in which 25 percent of the images were of Black inmates and in group two, 45 percent of the images were of Black inmates. They were then informed of strict criminal laws abiding in the state of California, followed by a petition form to sign to amend the laws and make them less harsh. From group one, more than 50 percent of the participants signed the petition, whereas only 28 percent of group two agreed to sign it.

In 2015, the Oakland Police Department committed to participate in President Barack Obama's Police Data Initiative. Through SPARQ, Eberhardt worked with the Oakland Police Department to analyze police stop data for racial disparities. They used computational linguistics to assess interactions between officers and members of the Oakland community. Although they found no explicit bias, they found that when speaking to white drivers, officers were reassuring, used positive words, and expressed concern for safety. In contrast, when officers were speaking to Black drivers, they more often used negative terms, stuttered, used informal language, and used less explanatory terms.

Bias in the education system Okonofua and Eberhardt (2015) examined teachers' responses to students' misbehaviors, and whether there were racial differences in how these responses were directed. The study discovered teachers' responses contributed to racial disparities in discipline in the sense that Black students are more likely to be labeled as "troublemakers" than White students. It was also found that when students of color and White students commit similar behaviors, the behaviors are viewed as being more serious for students of color. Black students' misbehaviors are more likely to be viewed as a pattern than White students. The study also found that responses given by teachers may potentially drive racial differences in students' behaviors.

In 2016, Okonofua, Walton, and Eberhardt ran a meta-analysis on past research literature examining how social-psychological factors play a role in the structure of racial disparities in teacher-student relationships. Findings in the research suggest pervasive negative stereotypes may give rise to mistrustful relationships between racially stigmatized students and teachers. For example, in instances where Black students are often given the label of 'troublemakers', students may feel stigmatized and have distrust for teachers, thus they are more likely to misbehave in the future. As a result, such teachers' interactions with students through frequent labelling can potentially produce a never-ending cycle of increased punishment and misbehaviors. The meta-analysis also noted an approach that has been implemented in over 7000 schools in the U.S. called the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports approach (PBIS), the authors argued although the approach aims to improve students' behavior, the subject of positive teacher-student relationship is neglected. Therefore, future interventions should aim to solve psychological barriers in order to reinforce positive teacher-student relationships rather than placing the majority of emphasis on teaching social skills, or prescriptive rules.

Awards and recognition