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Lab Members
Lab Director
Chadly Stern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research broadly examines how belief systems and motivations guide the way that people perceive and interact with the world. One central line of work concerns how political belief systems (e.g., whether a person is liberal or conservative) shape the way in which people evaluate and categorize others based on group membership (e.g., race, sex, and sexual orientation). Another line of work examines consensus in political groups, and the implications of both perceived and actual attitude consensus for individual behavior (e.g., voting) and large-scale societal outcomes (e.g., levels of societal stability).
Email: chadly@illinois.edu
Yarden Ashur received her B.A. in Behavioural Science and her M.A. in Social Psychology from Ben Gurion University in Israel before pursuing a Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
In her research, she is broadly interested in exploring the association between group memberships and social perception. In one line of research, she focuses on the way political ideology in the U.S. affects social categorizations, both when looking for information to make such categorizations as well as reaching consensus with other group members. In another line of research she looks at the effects of language in public condemnations on intergroup reconciliation within the context of the Jewish Arab conflict in Israel.
Salvador Vargas Salfate received a BA in Sociology from Universidad de Chile and an MA in Psychology from New York University. He is currently a fifth-year PhD student in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on political ideology and legitimation of inequality.
More info here.
Karl Conroy received his BA in history from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. He is now a third-year PhD student in psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on adult attachment, interpersonal relationships, and social cognition.
Alumni
Brenda Straka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the MOSAIC Lab (Minds On Social groups And Identity Cognition). Broadly, she studies the ways people navigate exclusion and discrimination and construct social identities across multiple group memberships throughout the lifespan. In one line of her research, she explores the ways historically marginalized and underrepresented groups (e.g., Multiracial, Latino/a/e, Native American people, first-generation students) experience exclusion and negotiate their group-based identities. In a second line of work, she studies the developmental cognitive foundations of understanding group membership and identity.
More info here.
Meisam Vahedi was a Social and Personality Psychology Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.A. in Religion from Florida International University, an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Tehran, and a B.Sc. in Metallurgy Engineering from the University of Tehran.
Broadly, he studies close relationship functioning and predictors of health behaviors. His focus is on how attachment orientations and personality characteristics influence close relationship functioning. He also examines how personality characteristics and negative life events (e.g., rejection, exclusion) may influence participation in health behaviors such as alcohol and drug use. He is now a lecturer at the University of Houston.
Julia Spielmann received her PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Psychology at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is interested in understanding issues related to intergroup relations.
Andrea Kunze received her PhD in Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Butler University. Her research explores the cognitive and social factors that shape students perceptions of racial discrimination in higher education spaces.
Hanxiong Guan received his MS in Psychological Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a PhD student in Marketing at the University of Washington.
Kaitlin Ratcliff received her BA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a major in Psychology and minor in Criminology, Law, and Society. She was in the Psychology Honors Program. She is currently a student at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Siqi Feng received her MS in Psychological Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme at Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests mainly focus on the processes through which intergroup contact shapes social perception and attitudes.
Zayd Jawad received his BA majoring in Communication and minoring in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received his MA in Business Administration at Washington University in St. Louis. He is interested in investigating the interplay of cognitive and emotional processes in intergroup relations in order to promote greater trust, cooperation, and reconciliation.
Pete Ondish received his PhD in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses mainly on social class and political cultures. More specifically, he investigates 1) how political ideology shapes perceptions of hierarchy and social class, 2) how ideological groups develop consensus and what the implications are of political consensus for society, and 3) working and middle class cultural differences.
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