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Profile of Mahzarin R. Banaji

Harvard University experimental social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is on the frontlines of the “implicit revolution,” a paradigm shift in psychology that, since the 1980s, has been reconceiving the relationship between unconscious and conscious mental processes. Banaji and her colleague Anthony Greenwald applied the concept to social psychology via the intertwined concepts of attitude, belief, and identity. In 1995, the duo defined implicit social cognition, introduced the term “implicit bias,” and foreshadowed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to detect and measure automatic, unintentional biases. The IAT and other methods have enabled Banaji and her colleagues to uncover hidden biases in the form of attitudes and beliefs (stereotypes) of gender, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other common social group identifiers. Elected in 2018 to the National Academy of Sciences, Banaji reports evidence in her Inaugural Article (IA) suggesting that implicit beliefs and attitudes are inextricably linked due to shared evaluative content.



Photograph of Mahzarin Banaji. Image courtesy of Robert Taylor (photographer).



Banaji was raised Zoroastrian in the Hindu and Muslim cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, India. “My family and I remained largely within the borders of a small and homogenous Parsi community, while voraciously learning about the world through the printed page,” she says. Her father Rustom shared his love of the arts with his children, but the scientist in Banaji was equally captivated by the inner workings of toys and mechanical objects. She says, “It seemed obvious that whatever was inside and hidden from view was infinitely more fascinating than whatever was outside and accessible.”

Her mother Coomi was a teacher who, with Banaji’s aunt, opened a small school in their home. To keep her precocious daughter from getting bored, Coomi recruited five-year-old Banaji to mentor younger students. This continued until Banaji entered St. Ann’s, a local parochial school. Years later, after …