How Identity Shapes the Formation, Maintenance, and Intersections of Social Hierarchy: Disability and Race
Sa-kiera Hudson, Professor
Business, Haas School
Open. Apprentices needed for the fall semester. Enter your application online beginning August 21st. The deadline to apply is Monday, August 31st, 4pm.
Social psychology researchers have long theorized how social identity influences perception, treatment, and experience, but until recently, researchers have almost exclusively studied social identity in isolation. Recognizing these gaps, social psychologists have increasingly adopted intersectionality as an analytical tool to inform theory, hypotheses, and methodology. At the Haas Intersectionality, Group Hierarchy, and Emotions Research (HIGHER) Laboratory, critically engaging identity through a singular and multidimentional lens is a central focus of the lab. We have several projects regarding identity, listed below.
Disability: Disability, defined as any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits major life activities, is one of the world’s largest minority groups (United Nations, 2025), with some estimates indicating that over a quarter of the US population alone has a disability (CDC, 2025). Despite its prevalence and, thus, policy relevance, disability remains underrepresented in mainstream management literature relative to other social categories such as gender and race (Colella et al., 2017). This neglect is consequential: people with disabilities continue to face substantial barriers in employment, healthcare, and social inclusion (Tran et al., 2024). To combat this, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law on July 26, 1990, which prohibits discrimination and guarantees equal employment opportunities for people with disabilities. While lauded as a historic win for disability rights, employment rates for people with disabilities have largely remained stagnant since its passage in 1990, and the ADA has been consistently underenforced in the workplace (Acemoglu & Angrist, 1998; Bagenstos, 2009b; Jolls, 2004; Pappas, 2020).
In this research line, Professor Hudson and graduate student Kyra Rodrigues are running a series of studies examining disability within the workplace, including broad perceptions of those with disabilities, implicit and explicit attitudes towards those with disabilities, and requests for accommodations in a political climate that eschews anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Race (Asian): In the U.S., racial group membership communicates an individual’s structural advantages and disadvantages. However, social psychologists have historically dichotomized race relations as an interplay between advantaged White and disadvantaged Black people. This approach fails to account for ambivalent representations of groups like Asian Americans, who are both positively and negatively stereotyped. Research on Asian Americans’ position relative to White and Black people has primarily focused on the former, finding that people stereotype Asian Americans as uniformly successful, especially compared to Black people (Goh et al., 2023). This stereotype is termed the “model minority myth” (MMM) because it dismisses ethnic and socioeconomic diversity within the Asian American umbrella. Moreover, this narrow focus on the MMM tends to discount other relevant dimensions, such as foreignness, where Asian Americans are positioned below White and Black people. The existence of this “perpetual foreigner stereotype” (PFS) highlights the precarity of the MMM and poses the question: how can Asian Americans simultaneously be venerated as model minorities and ostracized as perpetual foreigners?
Across multiple cross-sectional studies, we find that endorsement of the MMM and PFS, while seemingly paradoxical, are united as hierarchy-enhancing ideologies that reinforce racial inequality. Endorsement of both stereotypes is positively correlated with participants’ acceptance and promotion of group-based inequality, or social dominance orientation (SDO); other hierarchy-enhancing ideologies like just world beliefs and belief in meritocracy; and hierarchy-enhancing outcomes like anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. The HIGHER lab is currently recruiting RAs to help run follow-up experimental studies to test for causality and downstream consequences on collective action and policy support.
Role: Students will act as research assistants (RAs) for Haas Intersectionality, Group Hierarchy, and Emotions Research (HIGHER) Lab, a social psychology research laboratory directed by Professor Hudson. As a part of this apprenticeship, students will assist in the production and publication of experimental social psychological research for a minimum of 6 hours/week (maximum 20 hours), including literature reviews, survey design, data management, stimuli creation, and running experiments. Students will also attend weekly, in-person lab meetings (Thursdays, 11:00 - 12:00 PM) facilitated by Professor Hudson and other lab members, and meet at least monthly with their assigned mentor(s). At the end of the semester, all students will write a final paper and present a research poster/presentation summarizing their work.
Qualifications: An ideal candidate is interested in graduate school in Social Psychology, Management, and/or Organizational Behavior, or a career in behavioral research. Experience with R (or other coding languages) is beneficial but not required. All technical knowledge necessary to do well in the position will be taught throughout the semester.
Hours: to be negotiated
Related website: https://www.higherlaboratory.com
Related website: https://www.higherlaboratory.com