Patricia Devine
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Patricia Grace Devine is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was the psychology department chair from 2009 to 2014.[1] She was also the 2012 president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.[2]
She is an experimental social psychologist who specializes in prejudice, stereotypes, and intergroup relations.[3] She received her PhD in social psychology from Ohio State University in 1986.[4]
Devine's 1989 paper, Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components,[5] received the prestigious Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, recognizing her paper's lasting impact that fundamentally altered the landscape of prejudice and stereotyping research.[6] Her paper demonstrated that stereotypes and prejudicial emotions can be activated automatically, in opposition to one's explicit, controlled beliefs.[7] This insight has spurred four decades of research on the automaticity and control of prejudice.
In 2006, she, Austin, Forscher, and Cox developed an intervention that taught participants cognitive techniques to overcome unintentional race bias, which was able to reduce implicit bias up to two months after the intervention.[8] Since that initial publication in 2012, the bias habit-breaking training intervention has been tested in over a dozen randomized controlled trials and shown to be effective and generalizable to different forms of bias.[9]
