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, I 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. I will also discuss the consequences of those meaning-making processes for people’s judgments, motivations, and decisions across multiple domains. I will conclude with implications of this research for social scientific theories, and the practical application of those theories.
Neil Lewis, Jr. is a behavioral scientist who studies how social interventions and policies can motivate behavioral changes to promote equitable outcomes in society. He is an assistant professor of communication and social behavior at Cornell University, and assistant professor of communication research in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.