Sheri R. Levy and her research team study factors that cause and maintain prejudice, stigmatization, and negative intergroup relations and that can be harnessed to reduce bias, marginalization, and discrimination. Our research focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. One main line of our research concerns the pivotal role of people’s lay (everyday) belief systems on social, academic, and health outcomes relevant to prejudice, stigmatization, and intergroup relations. Examples of these beliefs systems are entity and incremental theories of personality, essentialism, Protestant work ethic, polyculturalism, multiculturalism, and colorblindness.

To obtain a fuller understanding of intergroup processes, our research team studies different age groups in educational and community settings (including children, adolescents, adults) and uses a variety of methodologies including relatively brief experimental research in our laboratory, online questionnaire studies, brief surveys in the local community, nationwide telephone surveys, cross-sectional longitudinal studies, and daily and weekly diary studies (especially during pivotal transitions, e.g., transition to college). In this work, we examine social, academic, and health outcomes such as stereotyping, prejudice, group identification, diversity orientation, intergroup volunteerism, academic engagement, academic persistence, and psychological well-being.