Present Research My current research explores the nexus of race and gender as a focus for understanding the psychological underpinnings of prejudice and discrimination. In my work, I explore how innate decision rules and categorization processes can sometimes generate automatic and persistent anxious responses to people of different social groups other than one’s own. I am currently using a fear conditioning paradigm to explore the possibility that xenophobia (or fear of outgroups) is at least in part a product of our evolved psychology that has been designed by natural selection to avoid dangerous situations and entities. For example, previous researchers have found that in monkey and human subjects, conditioned fear responses resist extinction towards targets such as spiders and snakes, but that conditioned fear responses towards stimuli not danger-relevant in an evolutionary sense (e.g. birds or butterflies) are extinguished quite easily. This research shows the importance of how experience and learning are not opposed to instinct, but that innate nervous system responses can latch onto learned categories in a non-random, adaptive way. My work investigates these evolved learning biases with respect to the social categories of ingroup/outgroup and male/female. On the assumption that humans might have evolved learning biases towards some targets more than others, my colleagues and I have shown that fear responses equally conditioned to racial ingroup and outgroup targets are extinguished unequally, such that learned fear persists and resists extinction towards targets of a racial outgroup but not an ingroup. More importantly, we’ve also shown that this fear extinction bias extends only towards males of the outgroup but not females—as outgroup males are likely to have posed the greatest physical threat throughout our evolutionary history. The effects in the studies hold for white subjects with African American targets and African American subjects towards white targets. Furthermore, whether subjects endorsed cultural stereotypes of the racial outgroup did not effect their levels of residual fear. We plan to conduct further manipulations of the ingroup and outgroup targets in future experiments including age, socioeconomic status, nationality, and even minimally defined social categorizations  to test the limits of the generalizability of these findings. In future studies, we hope to find key developmental or cognitive attributes of the individual that mitigate the nervous system responses that underlie xenophobia. Such findings would be an important step toward allaying or someday ending one of humanity’s most enduring problems. Click here  for a manuscript describing these results.   Future Directions Social inequality and future discounting. I am also interested in bridging the conceptual gap between the two standard theoretical camps that seek to understand the attitudes and behavior of members of disadvantaged groups who are often the targets of discrimination. Socio-cultural approaches regard the behaviors of the low-status minority groups as emanating from a “culture of poverty” or “oppositional norms” rife with deviant values and self-defeating attitudes, perpetuating actions that inhibit social mobility. In contrast, rational actor approaches presume that such people pursue their goals effectively based on their life prospects, and hold coherent and justified beliefs relevant to achieving such ends. I am currently laying a theoretical and empirical groundwork that seeks to link these two views with a synthesis that describes the behavioral patterns of the targets of discrimination as neither optimally calculating nor necessarily deviant. Rather, such strategies might be adaptive in other contexts, except that in situations with narrow margins for error, such action patterns often manifest themselves in behavior that can lead to worse outcomes. From this perspective, individuals' responses to their stigmatized status in a system of group-based social inequality can be seen as generated by a “boundedly rational” computational system that weighs potential outcomes of various strategies and chooses among them based on a series of environmental inputs. For example, behaviors such as dropping out of school, not saving money, early parenthood, and aggressively defending against slight affronts to one’s reputation may reflect the output of psychological mechanisms designed to steeply discount the future as a function of the appropriate weighting of present rewards against future investments depending on one's life stage, socioeconomic circumstances, and social categorization as a member of a stigmatized group. As such, the adjustment of discount rates in relation to these variables is just what should be expected from a normally-functioning human mind that evolved to cope with unequal outcomes. I am currently conducting several exploratory studies using hundreds of research subjects who vary widely in national, ethnic, demographic and socioeconomic indicators. Several investigations explore how structural variables, such as neighborhood income inequality and violent crime indices, are related to perceptions of racial bias, vulnerability to danger, and feelings of uncertainty, and how these psychological variables might then be related to a host of important social attitudes and life outcome variables such as: age at parenthood, mate selection criteria, sexual behavior, mental health, and the violent defense of one’s reputation. Moral judgment, reasoning, emotion, and action in virtual environments.. I am interested in the idea that the psychological system that produces moral judgments can be liked to linguistic systems, where innate decision rules can give rise to a staggering array of different outputs depending on the environmental input. Given the obvious ethical problem of confronting research subjects with dilemmas of any meanigful gravity (e.g. life or death outcomes) in a "real world" behavioral context, most empirical work in moral psychology examine morality in terms of "hypothetical" moral dilemmas. However, recent advances in virtual techology has allowed for the possibility that such experiments can now be reasonably conducted using 3-dimensional images of landscapes and people in an immersive artificial environment. Such environments have been found to be effective in eliciting physiological and behavioral responses with high ecological validity. Experiments are currently under way that seek to uncover the computational rules that underly moral emotion, reasoning, judgments and behavioral outcomes in intergroup contexts using "virtual reality" technology.