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Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Award-winning social psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious bias

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TED: How racial bias works — and how to disrupt it
  • About Jennifer L. Eberhardt

    Social psychologist Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt is fascinated by the ways ingrained stereotypes can affect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, unprecedented access to data, and a wide-ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Dr. Eberhardt has revealed the startling and often dispiriting extent to which racial imagery and judgments take root in our brains, suffuse our culture and society, and shape actions and outcomes within the criminal justice system.

    Through her innovative experiments, Dr. Eberhardt has shown not only that police officers are more likely to identify African American faces as criminal than white faces, but that the race-crime association leads people to attend more closely to crime-related imagery. For example, in one experiment, people who were exposed to Black faces were more quickly able to identify a blurred image of a gun than those who were exposed to white faces or no faces. She quantified the devastating effects of race-crime association outside the laboratory through experiments that showed a correlation between the appearance of African American defendants and the severity of their sentencing.

    Dr. Eberhardt believes the problems associated with race are ones we have created, but they are also ones we can solve. Inspired by Silicon Valley innovation, she aims to combine social psychological insights with technology to improve outcomes in the criminal justice system and beyond. She often works with law enforcement agencies to help them improve policing by building and maintaining trust within the communities they serve, but her reach extends beyond police departments. Eberhardt also worked closely with Nextdoor’s in-house team to develop new systems to combat bias on the app. After implementing her recommendations, the start-up was able to curb racial profiling incidents by 75%.

    In her book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Dr. Eberhardt offers a reasoned look into the effects of implicit racial bias and practical suggestions for reform, while taking the reader behind the scenes to police departments implementing her strategies. Her eye-opening lectures draw not only from her state-of-the-art laboratory experiments, but from research she has conducted in courtrooms, prisons, police departments, boardrooms, and on the street.

    Dr. Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford and a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. The Rockefeller University recently awarded her the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy‘s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She also is co-founder and co-director of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a Stanford Center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant social problems.

    Discover Dr. Eberhardt can help your organization unpack unconscious bias. Visit her Company Reads page to learn more.

    Contact us to learn more about bringing Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt to your next event. 

  • Speaking Topics

    Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

    Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt draws from state-of-the-art technology, innovative experiments, and meticulous data to uncover how implicit bias shapes our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. She takes audiences behind the scenes of her research and the police departments who are implementing her strategies, and offers a shocking, but reasoned look at the effects of implicit racial bias while offering practical suggestions for reform.

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  • Praise for Jennifer L. Eberhardt

    Praise for Biased

    Powerful…useful for those new to the topic as well as those well-versed in the topic…Eberhardt abandons the jargon-speak of academic research and speaks to the reader’s head, heart, and soul…[and] will make you think about the news, your neighborhood, your work place and yourself with fresh eyes.

    Forbes

    A fascinating new book… [Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is] a genius.

    Trevor Noah, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

    Jennifer Eberhardt’s work is essential to helping us understand racial inequalities in our country and around the world.

    Michelle Alexander, author of New York Times bestseller The New Jim Crow

    The hope for progress is greatly increased by Jennifer Eberhardt’s groundbreaking new book on implicit bias. Biased presents the science of bias with rare insight and accessibility, but it is also a work with the power and craft to make us see why overcoming racial bias is so critical.

    Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy

    She is saying things that make people uncomfortable, but she has the evidence to back up the reality of what’s she’s describing… [her work is]…original, provocative, and rigorous. I think she has changed the way we all think about the American dilemma of race.

    Susan Fiske, Psychologist, Princeton University

    This is not someone who is just doing work in the ivory tower of a university. This is someone who is really out in the trenches working with police departments and the criminal justice system.

    Chris Magnus, Chief of Police, Tucson, Arizona

    This book makes a significant contribution to our thinking about the role of bias in both our institutions and our perceptions.

    Deb Bubb, Vice President, Human Resources, IBM Chief Leadership and Learning Officer

    Jennifer is one of the great thinkers and one of the great voices of our time…I believe her book will change the conversation on race in our society–and perhaps our society itself.

    Carol Dweck, author of New York Times bestseller Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
  • Books by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

  • Media About Jennifer L. Eberhardt

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  • 212 572-2013
  • Jennifer L. Eberhardt travels from Stanford, California

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