John F. Dovidio

Carl Iver Hovland Professor of Psychology and Public Health

John Dovidio, B.A. Dartmouth College, Ph.D. University of Delaware, faculty member at Yale since 2007: Your elegant research has illuminated the processes of mind that sustain and reproduce racial and other forms of inequality, despite the legal and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, your “aversive racism” framework outlines the ways in which prejudice continues to shape the decisions we make. Through this work, you’ve offered the world a sobering reminder that decidedly nonprejudiced people will, often unknowingly, continue to behave in discriminatory ways and will do so under circumstances that allow them to maintain an egalitarian self-image. Yet you have managed to communicate this inconvenient truth with empathy, inviting audiences to self-reflect and evaluate past decisions, equipping us to make better decisions going forward.

You are plausibly one of the most prolific, generative, and impactful scholars that social psychology has produced. This is not due solely to your astonishing publication record, but also to the influence you and your work have had on any number of professional domains and organizations. Your insights on the psychology of prejudice have changed how medical schools teach doctors to interact with patients across racial lines, how teachers do the same with students, how managers make hiring decisions, and have informed the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine as it attempts to grasp the many ways that race and racism undermine the health or well-being of American citizens. Your efforts to place yourself in the room where decisions are happening, all in the service of disrupting the everyday reproduction of societal disparities, are nothing short of extraordinary. You embody the very best of social psychology, of social science more broadly, and certainly the promise and potential of engaged scholarship to solve society’s biggest problems.

Not only has your research challenged the way the field and the world think about the roots of prejudice and discrimination, it has also revealed the power of social affiliations, “our ingroups,” to shape human behavior, whether for altruistic and prosocial ends or in service of the very worst forms of intergroup violence. Most significantly, you have also demonstrated how to leverage the psychology of group affiliations to overcome our automatic prejudices and instead engender cooperation. Perhaps it is this research on the power of common ingroup identities that has inspired you to work so tirelessly to create strong communities at each of your previous institutions and certainly during your time here at Yale.

As influential as your work has been as a scholar, it is rivaled by your service as a mentor to generations of undergraduate and graduate students. Your guidance, attention, and wisdom have altered the trajectories of vast network of early-career social psychologists from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority backgrounds that extends far beyond your official trainees, and you have performed this vital service with neither compensation nor credit. In the last years, Yale has counted on you for the same contributions, as it seeks to adapt to the changing social landscape. For so many, and for so many years, in the world and at Yale, you have been a moral compass.

Social psychology at Yale has a rich, storied history. Names like Carl Hovland, Stanley Milgram, Irving Janis, Bob Abelson, and Bill McGuire come to mind. Yale is so fortunate to be able to add the name Jack Dovidio to this list and to this legacy.