Mahzarin Banaji

Mahzarin Rustum Banaji (born 1956) is an American psychologist of Indian origin at Harvard University, known for popularizing the concept of implicit bias with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation and other factors. She was born and raised in Secunderabad to a Parsi family, took her bachelor's degree at Nizam College and a master's degree at Osmania University, and earned a doctorate at The Ohio State University in 1986. She taught at Yale from 1986 to 2001, then moved to Harvard as the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics. She was president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2010 and 2011, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and, as a corresponding fellow, the British Academy. In 2018 she shared the Golden Goose Award with Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek for work on implicit bias, and in 2024 she received the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the social sciences. With Greenwald she also wrote the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.