What We Learn from Where We Live: How Contemporary Segregation Affects Our Minds

The United States has long been, and continues to be, a highly segregated society. When societies separate groups of people in the ways that we do in the U.S., that separation has not only economic, political, and sociological consequences, it also affects how people think and communicate about social issues and interventions to address them. In this talk, Dr. Neil Lewis Jr. (he/him) will share recent findings from my program of research that has been using the United States as a context to examine how patterns of segregation and other forms of social stratification seep into the mind and affect how people perceive and make meaning of the world around them. He will also discuss the consequences of those meaning-making processes for people’s judgments, motivations, and decisions across multiple domains. He will conclude with implications of this research for social scientific theories, and the practical application of those theories.

Dr. Neil Lewis, Jr. (he/him) is a behavioral scientist who studies the motivational, behavioral, and equity implications of social interventions and policies. He is a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine, where he is an associate professor in the department of communication, division of general internal medicine, school of public policy, and graduate field of psychology. He also co-founded and co-directs Cornell’s Action Research Collaborative, which brings together researchers, practitioners, community members, and policymakers to collaborate on projects and initiatives to address pressing issues in society. Lewis has received the SAGE Young Scholar Early Career Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, and the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.