Date:        Wednesday, April 29, 2026
                   Lecture from 3:30 - 5:00 pm with reception to follow

Location: Thomas Friedman Hall at David Rubenstein Forum
                   1201 E. 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois

Registration: This lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required.  
                          Please RSVP here. 

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

All humans genuinely intend to obey the virtues of accuracy and fairness, but research from experimental psychology has consistently challenged the possibility that we, in fact, do so. We have learned that our actions can be inconsistent with our values, obstructing the very goals to which we are consciously and even passionately committed. A striking example of this state of affairs is that even if conscious prejudice/animus is genuinely absent, alternative measures and behavior can reveal evidence of implicit bias. In this lecture, Banaji will use examples of everyday decisions to highlight lapses in thinking and feeling that have costs for our own welfare and lead to the suboptimal decisions in domains such as business, healthcare, and education. If time permits, she will provide a live demonstration of what implicit bias is by eliciting responses from the audience as a group and end with evidence of bias in large language corpora (LLMs) today. The overarching call of this work is a simple one: to deeply understand the scientific basis of implicit bias. And to use this knowledge to do what our species has done many times before in our history: to outsmart the limits of our own minds to ensure that our consciously held values of accuracy and fairness translate into a more praiseworthy world. 

Speaker bio

Mahzarin Banaji, PhD, taught at Yale from 1986-2001 where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology. Since then, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Banaji served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and as the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. Banaji is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Science. She is the recipient of the William James Fellow and Cattell Fellow Awards from the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president.  As well, she has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from APA, the Atkinson Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation, and honorary degrees from seven universities. 

Workshop: Implicit Social Cognition on April 30

Mahzarin Banaji will speak about implicit social cognition research, and her lab's research path, at a workshop on April 30 from 12:30 - 2:00pm.  This workshop is open to UChicago faculty, students, researchers and staff. Please register here by Friday, April 24. 

If you need assistance attending these events, please contact Kristi Schonwald at kschonwa@uchicago.edu or 773-702-8861.