Health, Identity, Essentialism, & Stigma Research Team
The Health, Identity, Essentialism, & Stigma (HIES) Research Team examines how social meanings shape people’s understandings of themselves and others, with consequences for identity, health, and inequality. We study these processes from the perspectives of both perceivers, whose beliefs and judgments may stigmatize others, and targets, whose identities and health are shaped by experiencing or anticipating stigma. Intersectionality guides our attention to how social identities and systems of inequality operate together. We examine how intersecting social positions shape exposure to stigma, interpretations of experience, and possibilities for resistance. Our work comprises two related research programs. The first investigates how people internalize, resist, and respond to stigmatizing messages about their social groups. The second examines beliefs about race and biology and how they shape racial perception, prejudice, and explanations of inequality.
Internalized Stigma, Identity, and Health
This program examines how stigmatizing social messages become incorporated into people’s understandings and experiences of themselves. Internalized stigma extends beyond agreement with negative stereotypes to include changes in self-evaluation, identity, group identification, expectations of others’ judgments, and behavior. Because exposure does not necessarily result in internalization, we investigate when stigmatizing meanings are incorporated, resisted, or transformed and how these responses affect psychological and physical health. We also examine how these processes vary according to identity importance, relationships, social environments, structural conditions, and opportunities for individual and collective resistance. Our goal is to identify both common processes across forms of internalized stigma and meaningful differences associated with race, sexual orientation, gender, body size, illness, and other stigmatized identities.
Racial Essentialism and the Psychology of Race
This program examines how people understand the nature and origins of racial categories, focusing on biological racial essentialism—the belief that racial groups are natural, inherited, and fundamentally distinct biological kinds. We investigate how these beliefs shape racial categorization, interpretations of ancestry, stereotyping, prejudice, medical judgments, and explanations of racial inequality. We also examine how discussions of genes, ancestry, and population differences can reinforce biological understandings of race without explicitly endorsing biological determinism. In this way, essentialism organizes social perception by shaping which differences people notice, which explanations appear plausible, and whether racial inequality is understood as socially produced or biologically natural.