Kyle Ratner

Assistant Professor

Research Area

Social Psychology

Biography

Kyle Ratner received his B.A. in psychology from Cornell University. He then worked as a research assistant at Harvard University and obtained an M.A. in psychology and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from New York University. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSB, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University.

Research

Kyle Ratner investigates how biological systems interact with social contexts to influence human psychology and behavior. He is particularly interested in the processes that give rise to intergroup reactions (e.g., ingroup favoritism, prejudice, discrimination, stigma) and the consequences of these reactions for social relations and individual well-being. Current research focuses on the effects of group identities on face processing and the relationship between perceived stigmatization and health. To study these issues, he draws from theories and methods from a wide-range of disciplines, including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, vision science, immunology, pharmacology, and genetics.

Selected Publications

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 897-911.

Young, A. I., Ratner, K. G., & Fazio, R. H. (2014). Political attitudes bias the mental representation of a presidential candidate’s face. Psychological Science, 25, 503-510.

Kaul, C., Ratner, K. G., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). Dynamic representations of race: Processing goals shape race encoding in the fusiform gyri. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 326-332.

Ratner, K. G., Kaul, C., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2013). Is race erased? Decoding race from multivariate patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8, 750-755.

Ratner, K. G., Halim, M. L., & Amodio, D. M. (2013). Perceived stigmatization, ingroup pride, and immune and endocrine activity: Evidence from a community sample of Black and Latina women. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 82-91.

Ratner, K. G., & Amodio, D. M. (2013). Seeing “us vs. them": Minimal group effects on the neural encoding of faces. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 298-301.

Ratner, K. G., & Kubota, J. T. (2012). Genetic contributions to intergroup responses: A cautionary perspective. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6: 223.

Amodio, D. M., & Ratner, K. G. (2011). A memory systems model of implicit social cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 143-148.