Felicia Pratto

Felicia Pratto (born 1961) is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, the dynamics of power and social cognition, and is a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado, earned a bachelor's degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983 and a doctorate in psychology at New York University in 1988, and taught at Stanford University from 1990 to 1997 before moving to Connecticut. With Jim Sidanius she wrote Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, which describes how group-based hierarchies structure societies and feed conflict, racism, classism and patriarchy. Her research covers discrimination in hiring, prejudice against LGBTQ people and immigrants, violations of humanitarian law in war and the Arab uprisings, using surveys, laboratory games and field experiments. Papers by her and colleagues won the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award in 2008, the Gordon Allport Prize in 2011 and the Otto Klineberg Award in 2015. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.