My current research projects attempt to better understand the following questions:

Politics and Race Projects:

Do the safety cues of political diversity in friendship networks and learning goals independently and/or additively contribute to decreased social identity threat and improved interaction outcomes for liberals and conservatives in the United States?

With Paula Sholander and Drs. Daryl Wout and Grace Flores-Robles, we are attempting to build off of recently published work (Anderson et al., 2025) showing that encountering an interaction partner who is across the political divide and also has political diversity, rather than political homogeneity, in their friendship network can decrease social identity threat and improve interaction outcomes among White liberals and White conservatives in the United States. We have analyzed data for a pilot study with liberals in the United States, and we found that learning goals, like friendship diversity, also positively impact social identity threat and interaction outcomes, although to a somewhat lesser degree. While learning goals did independently impact identity threat and the interaction outcomes, it was not additive to the friendship diversity manipulation. Results for a second study with conservatives in the United States appear to largely replicate the effects from the first study.

Disability-Related Projects:

How do articles published in major social-psychological journals include or discuss disability?

Members of the Disability Advocacy and Research Network (DARN) and I are researching how disability is either discussed or mentioned in articles published in major social-psychological journals (JPSP, PSPB, SPPS). We found that major social-psychological journals rarely publish articles as a primary focus (the central focus of the article) or a non-primary focus (e.g., within the methods, statistical analyses, etc.). The manuscript is currently under review at Social Psychological and Personality Science.

How can intraminority relations between White disabled people and nondisabled racial minorities be improved?

I am in the early stages of writing an integrative review article on intraminority relations between White disabled people and nondisabled racial minorities. I am primarily interested in how shared experiences of discrimination, in the absence of specific shared identities, could improve intraminority relations and facilitate a common ingroup identity of shared disadvantage, in line with Cortland et al. (2017). We have IRB approval and are about to collect data for an initial correlational study, based on a similar, more simplified version of the diagram in Craig & Richeson (2016). While there are numerous topics I am considering investigating in this broad area of research, I am particularly interested in issues related to necropolitics and eugenics.