Michael Sargent

Associate Professor, Psychology Bates College, United States

Michael J. Sargent received his PhD in Social Psychology from the Ohio State University in 1999. Since then, he has been on the faculty in the Psychology Department at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, a department that he has chaired since 2007. During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago. All of Sargent’s research interests involve social judgment—judgments about self and others. He is particularly interested in the impact of race and other social categories on judgment. For instance, much of his recent work has examined the ways in which threat detection can be influenced by the social category membership of others. Here, he builds on the work of colleagues who first demonstrated that objects that are not weapons are often misperceived as weapons when they appear in close physical proximity or temporal succession to images of Black males. Much of Sargent’s work has potential relevance to the law, including a new line of work he is developing that focuses on the conditions that must be met for individuals’ judgments (including legal judgments) to be deduced from neutral principles and minimally influenced by potentially biasing factors, such as race or gender.

Source: Center for Practical Wisdom, University of Chicago