Yale University

Benedek Kurdi

Department of Psychology

As an experimental psychologist, my research seeks to understand the immense power and the surprising limitations of our minds in adaptively responding to new information given a lifetime of learning. I examine learning in the context of basic social processes. Specifically, I study the ordinary decisions we make every day that are critical to our well-being and even survival: our evaluations of and beliefs about other people. In doing so, I rely on a combination of traditional online and laboratory experiments as well as computational approaches, while drawing on a variety of learning paradigms, including reinforcement learning, evaluative conditioning, propositional learning, and causal learning. These methods help me uncover the basic mechanisms involved in how we acquire and update our impressions of individuals, especially against the backdrop of information about their social group memberships, such as gender, sexual orientation, age, race, and ethnicity.

I am currently a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Department of Psychology, working with Melissa Ferguson. As of July 2023, I will be joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psychology. I obtained my PhD in 2019 at the Harvard Psychology Department under the mentorship of Mahzarin Banaji, Fiery Cushman, and Sam Gershman and spent a year as a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Department of Psychology with Melissa Ferguson and Amy Krosch. My research has been funded by the Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship, the Harvard Graduate School Fund, the Harvard Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, the Stimson, Restricted, and Knox Funds at the Harvard Psychology Department, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. My work has been published in American Psychologist, Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and numerous other outlets.

I am a member of Project Implicit’s Scientific Advisory Board and serve on the editorial boards of Social Cognition and Social Psychological and Personality Science, and the emerging editors board at Personality and Social Psychology Review. I have extensive teaching experience in statistics, social cognition, and social psychology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I am a three-time recipient of the Derek Bok Center’s Harvard Distinction in Teaching Award and was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

Benedek Kurdi

Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Psychology
Yale University

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What do I do?

research

Taking a multi-tier approach to implicit cognition

Open science and resources All my projects have open data and materials. I have created multiple open-access resources for the community, including the OASIS stimulus set, as well as tools to calculate the reliability of indirect measures and estimate power for studies on the attitude–behavior relationship.

Attitudes in the wild I use methods (word embeddings, large archival datasets, meta-analyses) to understand how implicit evaluations operate in the world. Such information on variability and change complements experimental studies in theory building and has direct implications for inequality.

Implicit attitude change I use the experimental method to understand how implicit evaluations change. What are the inputs that they reflect? What type(s) of process are most effective in shifting them? Can short-term malleability translate into long-term change, and if so under what conditions?

Computational approaches I rely on computational methods — specifically, different reinforcement learning algorithms — to try to formalize the representational underpinnings of implicit evaluation. This approach, unlike most verbal theories, can generate quantitative and easy-to-falsify hypotheses.

Publications

The articles are provided to ensure the timely dissemination of scientific information.
In order to download an article, click the PDF button, and in order to obtain raw data files and analysis scripts, click the OSF button.

Kurdi, B., & Charlesworth, T. E. S. (in press). A 3D framework of implicit attitude change. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Kurdi B., Morehouse, K. N., & Dunham, Y. (2023). How do explicit and implicit evaluations shift? A preregistered meta-analysis of the effects of co-occurrence and relational information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(6), 1174–1202. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000329 PDF OSF
Charlesworth, T. E. S.*, Navon, M.*, Rabinovich, Y., Lofaro, N., & Kurdi, B. (2023). The Project Implicit International Dataset: Measuring implicit and explicit social group attitudes and stereotypes across 34 countries (2009–2019). Behavior Research Methods, 55(3), 1413–1440. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01851-2 PDF OSF
Mandelbaum, E., Dunham, Y., Feiman, R., Firestone, C., Green, E. J., Harris, D., Kibbe, M. M., Kurdi, B., Mylopoulos, M., Shepherd, J., Wellwood, A., Porot, N., & Quilty‐Dunn, J. (2022). Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thought. Cognitive Science, 46(12). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13225 PDF
Melnikoff, D. E., & Kurdi, B. (2022). What implicit measures of bias can do. Psychological Inquiry, 33(3), 185–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2022.2106759 PDF
Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2022). Implicit person memory: Domain-general and domain-specific processes of learning and change. In E. Balcetis & G. B. Moskowitz (Eds.), The handbook of impression formation: A social psychological approach (pp. 459–488). New York, NY: Routledge. PDF
Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2022). Implicit social cognition: A brief (and gentle) introduction. In A. S. Reber & R. Allen (Eds.), The cognitive unconscious: The first half-century (pp. 323–346). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. PDF
Kurdi, B., & Dunham, Y. (2022). What can the implicit social cognition literature teach us about implicit social cognition? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e80. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21000595 PDF
Kurdi, B.*, Hussey, I.*, Stahl, C.*, Hughes, S., Unkelbach, C., Ferguson, M. J., & Corneille, O. (2022). Unaware attitude formation in the surveillance task? Revisiting the findings of Moran et al. (2021). International Review of Social Psychology, 35(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.546 PDF OSF
Morehouse, K. N., Kurdi, B., Hakim, E., & Banaji, M. R. (2022). When a stereotype dumbfounds: Probing the nature of the surgeon = male belief. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 3, 100044. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2022.100044 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Morris, A., & Cushman, F. A. (2022). The role of causal structure in implicit evaluation. Cognition, 225, 105116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105116 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Mann, T. C., & Ferguson, M. J. (2022). Persuading the implicit mind: Changing negative implicit evaluations with an 8-minute podcast. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13(3), 688–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211037140 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Carroll, T. J., & Banaji, M. R. (2021). Specificity and incremental predictive validity of implicit attitudes: Studies of a race-based phenotype. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6, 61. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00324-y PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., & Dunham, Y. (2021). Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences. Cognition, 214, 104792. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104792 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Ratliff, K. A., & Cunningham, W. A. (2021). Can the Implicit Association Test serve as a valid measure of automatic cognition? A response to Schimmack (2021). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(2), 422–434. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620904080 PDF
Charlesworth, T. E. S., Yang, V., Mann, T. C., Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2021). Gender stereotypes in natural language: Word embeddings show robust consistency across child and adult language corpora of more than 65 million words. Psychological Science, 32(2), 218–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620963619 PDF OSF
Moran, T., Hughes, S., Hussey, I., Vadillo, M. A., Olson, M. A., ..., Kurdi, B., ..., & De Houwer, J. (2021). Incidental attitude formation via the surveillance task: A preregistered replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) study. Psychological Science, 32(1), 120–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620968526 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., & Dunham, Y. (2020). Propositional accounts of implicit evaluation: Taking stock and looking ahead. Social Cognition, 38(Supplement), s42–s67. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2020.38.supp.s42 PDF
Kurdi, B., Krosch, A. R., & Ferguson, M. J. (2020). Implicit evaluations of moral agents reflect intent and outcome. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, 103990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.103990 PDF OSF
Charlesworth, T. E. S., Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2020). Children’s implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed, repeated pairings fail. Developmental Science, 23(3), e12911. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12911 PDF OSF
Mann, T. C., Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2020). How effectively can implicit evaluations be updated? Using evaluative statements after aversive repeated evaluative pairings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(6), 1169–1192. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000701 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Gershman, S. J., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Model-free and model-based learning processes in the updating of explicit and implicit evaluations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(13), 6035–6044. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820238116 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Mann, T. C., Charlesworth, T. E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). The relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(13), 5862–5871. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820240116 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Attitude change via repeated evaluative pairings versus evaluative statements: Shared and unique features. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(5), 681–703. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000151 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B.*, Seitchik, A. E.*, Axt, J. R., Carroll, T. J., Karapetyan, A., Kaushik, N., Tomezsko, D., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Relationship between the Implicit Association Test and intergroup behavior: A meta-analysis. American Psychologist, 74(5), 569–586. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000364 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Diaz, A. J., Wilmuth, C. A., Friedman, M. C., & Banaji, M. R. (2018). Variations in the relationship between memory confidence and memory accuracy: The effects of spontaneous accessibility, list length, modality, and complexity. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(1), 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000117 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2017). Reports of the death of the individual difference approach to implicit social cognition may be greatly exaggerated: A commentary on Payne, Vuletich, and Lundberg. Psychological Inquiry, 28(4), 281–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2017.1373555 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2017). Repeated evaluative pairings and evaluative statements: How effectively do they shift implicit attitudes? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(2), 194–213. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000239 PDF OSF
Kurdi, B., Lozano, S., & Banaji, M. R. (2017). Introducing the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS). Behavior Research Methods, 49(2), 457–470. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-016-0715-3 PDF OSF

THOSE WHO DO (A LOT OF THE) WORK

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Past and present

PAST

Ahmed Izzidien

Dr. Ahmed Izzidien completed his MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University. He holds a BEng (Hons) from King's College London, an MSc from UMIST, and a PhD from Cardiff. His interests include cognitive neuroscience, electroencephalography, and cognition in religion and politics.

Preethi Raju

Preethi Raju is a sophomore student at the University of Chicago studying biology and economics. Her interests range from social psychology to medicine to tennis to classical Indian dance. She hopes to go to medical school in the future.

Sarah Ryan

Sarah Ryan is an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is concentrating in psychology with a minor in economics. She is interested in social and developmental psychology. In the future, she would like to do social psychological research with a focus on education inequality interventions.

Shayn Lozano

Catherine Kim

Catherine Kim is an undergraduate at Boston College majoring in Psychology. She is particularly curious about the ways in which language influences our thoughts and shapes the way we think about or perceive something. In the future, she hopes to do research on culture and its effects on human minds.

Ruolin Lu

Ruolin Lu is an undergraduate at Boston College majoring in Psychology. She is interested in clinical and social psychology. In the future she would like to pursue a PhD in one of these fields.

Harrison Satcher

Harrison Satcher is an undergraduate at Harvard University. He studies psychology, and has interests in statistics and computer science. In his free time he enjoys creative writing and weightlifting. In the future, he would like to work in academia.

Victor Yang

Victor Yang is a sophomore at Harvard University studying computer science. He also has an interest in psychology and the biological sciences. Outside of the classroom, he is part of Harvard's Engineers Without Borders chapter and relaxes by going on his daily runs.

Ece Hakim

Ece Hakim is an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is concentrating in psychology and planning to pursue a secondary in art history or filmmaking. She is interested in social and developmental psychology. In her free time, she enjoys acting and drawing.

Benedek Kurdi

Benedek Kurdi

Benedek Kurdi

CV for download

Twitter

What do I do?

Publications

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

PAST

Ahmed Izzidien

Preethi Raju

Sarah Ryan

Shayn Lozano

Catherine Kim

Ruolin Lu

Harrison Satcher

Victor Yang

Ece Hakim

OPEN AFFECTIVE STANDARDIZED IMAGE SET

IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST

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