Biography

Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson is an Assistant Professor at University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business in the Management of Organizations (MORS) group. She completed her doctoral graduate from the (Social) Psychology department at Harvard University in 2020. Before her PhD, she completed her BA in Biology and Psychology from Williams College, doing a thesis under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Randall Crosby on subjective power’s role in predicting the desires of in-group and out-group members. After college, she spent two transformative years as a lab manager for Dr. Jenessa Shapiro in the Social Interaction and Social Stigma Lab at UCLA. She completed her PhD under the guidance of Dr. Jim Sidanius, Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, and Dr. Mina Cikara, and her postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University working with Dr. Jennifer Richeson and Dr. Michael Kraus.

Kiera studies hierarchies: How hierarchies are formed, how they are maintained, and how they intersect. To answer these questions, she focuses on the role of i) empathic and spiteful emotions in supporting intergroup harm, ii) group stereotypes in the experience and perception of prejudice, and iii) motivated reasoning in justifying unequal societal conditions. In her first line of work, she focuses on emotion as a mechanism for maintaining hierarchy and inequality. Although research examining the importance of emotion in intergroup conflict has primarily centered inducing empathy to promote prosocial intergroup behaviors, lacking empathy is insufficient to motivate deeply harmful intergroup behaviors seen across social conflicts. In her work, she has added feeling schadenfreude (i.e., feeling positively in response to another person’s pain) in conjunction with the absence of empathy as dual contributors to group oppression. Further, she includes social dominance orientation —a measure of the extent to which individuals prefer group based inequality—as a relevant antecedent to empathy, schadenfreude, and intergroup conflict more broadly.

Her second line of work examines stereotyping as a mechanism of hierarchy maintenance. She examines the nature of descriptive (what groups are like) and prescriptive (what groups should be like) stereotypes at the intersections of multiple social identities. Specifically, her work exposes the role of prototypicality biases—assuming people are male (androcentrism), White (Eurocentrism), and straight (heterocentrism)—on the stereotypes people hold of intersectional targets. Finally, in her third line of work, she examines the hierarchy-reinforcing myth that social progress is a natural and inevitable consequence of the passage of time, which can lead individuals to believe there has been significantly more progress in achieving racial equality than what is supported by evidence. For example, this belief in racial progress leads individuals to underestimate how large the racial income and wealth gaps currently are in the United States.

Kiera also focuses on making psychological and behavioral science more equitable, dedicating time and effort to mentorship and service.