Mina Cikara

Mina Cikara is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She is the director of the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab, which adopts an interdisciplinary approach drawing on theory and methods from psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She focuses primarily on how group membership, threat, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others. She is equally interested in the behavioral consequences of these processes: discrimination, conflict, and harm.