SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, Dolores Albarracín, Anthony Greenwald and Richard Petty for “revolutionizing the way we understand and measure attitudes" with an influence that extends to “psychology, sociology, political science, education, health, economics, and other areas.”
Banaji researches how people’s conscious expressions of their values, attitudes, and beliefs differ from their less conscious expressions. In 1998, she and her co-developers Tony Greenwald and Brian Nosek placed the test online. In just one month, they got 40,000 responses. The data collected through the IAT has revolutionized the study of implicit bias. Banaji has paired the IAT results with patterns of neural activation to corroborate the behavioral results with neuroimaging, studied the origins of attitudes in young children and analyzed bias present in online texts and LLMs.
In her acceptance speech Banaji said, “The BBVA’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the social sciences this year is sui generis in my experience, because it honors above any single individual or even research team, an entire field of science. In choosing to recognize the five of us, born in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, in bringing the world’s attention to these ideas and discoveries, you recognize not only us but our intellectual ancestors who surely imagined but did not live to see a thriving science of attitudes became worthy of a recognition such as this.”
Banaji joins SFI External Professor and Science Board Member Matthew Jackson and SFI Science Board Member Simon Levin as BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award laureates.