Christine Reyna

Dr. Christine Reyna is a Professor in Psychology with a dual appointment in the Psychological Science and Community Psychology PhD programs. Her research focuses on the psychology of identity, status, intergroup conflict, and oppression, and how people legitimize prejudice and discrimination to maintain status, cultural values, and inequitable systems. She has examined how these processes manifest across various political and social issues, such as racial, gender and sexual discrimination, systemic injustice, immigration, education, health care, political polarization, and extremism. She is the founder of the Social and Intergroup Perceptions lab, which is a lively lab of diverse scholars from across psychology that integrates multi-method and cross-disciplinary approaches to better understand some of the most pressing issues of our times. As a scholar interested in the universal psychological underpinnings of prejudice, she examines prejudice in all its diverse forms, between as well as within cultural and ideological groups.  ​

BA Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991
MA Social Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1994
PhD Social Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2000

• The influence of stereotypes on attributional judgments
• Stereotypes as legitimizing ideologies
• The influence of stereotypes on political decision-making
• The use of stereotypes to convey identity
• Attributions and social justice
• Perceived value violation and political decision-making
• The origins and consequences of moral judgment
• The use of steretypes to convey identity
• The impact of interpersonal goals on impression formation and maintenance​