I am an assistant professor of psychology at UC Merced, the world's newest research university. I am also affiliated with the cognitive science group there.
My research recruits theoretical perspectives from developmental and cognitive psychology to better understand the acquisition of representations of social groups, as well as the development of stereotyping and prejudice. I'm also interested in applying these theoretical models to anti-bias education.
I've also done some work on the question of linguistic influences on thought, focusing on the mass-count distinction in English versus so-called 'classifier languages', which purportedly do not mark this distinction syntactically. Does the presence of absence of this syntactic distinction affect basic object-substance ontology?
Selected Papers
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2008). The development of implicit intergroup cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(7), 248-253. (download)
Olson, K. R., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M. R., Spelke, E. S., & Dweck, C.S. (2008). Judgments of the lucky across development and culture. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94(5), 757-776. (download)
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2007). The person and the group: A developmental analysis of implicit consistency among Hispanic-Americans. Self and Identity. (download)
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2006). From American city to Japanese village: A cross-cultural investigation of implicit race attitudes. Child Development 77(5), 1268-1281. (download)
Li, P., Dunham,
Y., & Carey, S. (accepted pending revisions). Of Substance: The Nature
of Language Effects on Construal. Cognitive Psychology.
Li, P., Dunham, Y., & Carey, S. (2006). Object-substance construal. Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Dunham, Y., Li, P., & Carey, S. (2003). Markedness and the object-substance distinction: New crosslinguistic evidence. Proceedings of the Tokyo International Conference on Psycholinguistics. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo Publishing. (download)
Dunham, Y. & Banaji, M.R. (2007). Angry=Black or Angry=Outgroup? Poster presented at the 8th annual meeting of the Society for Social and Personality Psychology, February 2007, Memphis, TN. (download)