Dr. Tessa Charlesworth (TC) is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working in the Department of Psychology with Mahzarin Banaji and in the Department of Psychology with Will Cunningham at the University of Toronto. She is a psychologist interested in how the mind and society interact and change across time. Some questions that her research tries to answer include how and why do the attitudes of our society shift towards or away from prejudice? Why do some attitudes change while others remain stagnant? What are the interventions that can best shift the biases of a society, organization, or individual? At its heart, her research program tackles these questions of how and why biased thoughts (beliefs) and feelings (attitudes) of social groups change. She uses a multi-level approach, considering change within the micro-level of an individual, the meso-level aggregates (e.g., demographic groups, organizations), and the macro-level society. To do so requires methodological insights across social, developmental, cognitive, and quantitative psychology, as well as proficiency in the fields of computer science, organizational behavior practices, sociology, and economics, including laboratory experiments, natural language processing, time series, and big data analyses. In this interview, Dr. Tessa Charlesworth gives an overview of her current work and touches on the importance of exploration, mentorship, and having fun in the process of becoming a psychology researcher.
SB: What got you interested in psychology?
TC: I never thought I was going to be a psychologist. I had planned on being an architect, since I was about nine years old. My grandparents were architects, and I had a drafting board and an architecture library… so my whole inheritance from my grandparents was to be an architect. For the first two years of college, I was an architecture major, but I wasn't super happy about it. I liked some of the qualities of architecture, mainly that you could bridge the Arts and Sciences. You had the physics and engineering background, but you also had the visual arts, design, and other things. One of the distribution classes that I had to take on the visual, artsy side was an Intro to Psychology course. And amid me feeling like, ‘architecture might not be for me,’ I also started feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh… Introduction to Psychology, this class is amazing.’ This is why I am excited to teach these intro-level courses—I've seen firsthand that they can either really inspire someone to go into the field, or entirely turn them off. I was lucky; I got a professor that really inspired me. From then, I basically decided that I wanted to be a psychologist. But I didn't know what part of psychology I wanted to do.
My first entry in psychology actually started in neuroscience. I worked with Kevin Ochsner (Ph.D.) at Columbia, which is where I did my undergrad in their social cognitive neuroscience area. We were investigating questions related to language and the brain. I worked there for a semester, and then I ended up doing an independent research project with monkeys in Nicaragua. Back then, I was taking classes in evolutionary psychology and the origins of cognition, and there was a cool program that you could take in Nicaragua to run your study in their field sites with the supervision of a professor. So, I got into that program and got funding from Colombia to go. In that program, my research was looking at mimicry between mothers and juvenile monkeys. How do juvenile monkeys learn certain kinds of behaviors, like social behaviors, howling, or grooming behaviors? Do they do it by mimicking their mother, or by mimicking some other female monkey or some other male monkey who is in the vicinity? What's the rate of mimicry? That was a fascinating project to do as a junior in college, but it was also really intense because fieldwork is hard. We were out there for two months and we collected only 25 hours of data. From that experience I again began to wonder, ‘maybe not fieldwork, maybe not evolutionary psychology.’
After that experience in Nicaragua, I studied abroad at Cambridge for a year. While I was there, I worked at a comparative cognition lab where we were working with corvids (crows, essentially). I was still really interested in evolution and early origins. I also did another internship in a developmental lab, where we were looking at theory of mind in young children. That opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about change and development in the origins of cognition. I realized I was more interested in the ontogenetic story than in the evolutionary story. So, I sought out opportunities to work in developmental labs.
The following summer I worked in a developmental lab at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Andrew Baron, who studies the development of social cognition, specifically the development of racial bias and gender bias in early childhood. As soon as I got there, I read some of his papers and they had profound findings of young children developing biases against their own groups at very, very early ages. And it was at that moment that I realized: ‘This is my calling. This is everything that all of these other explorations in psychology have been leading me towards. The research has a little bit of social, of developmental, of cognitive…” All of those things came together. So, I decided to apply to Ph.D. programs in social-cognitive development broadly.
I applied to work mostly with developmentalists, with one exception: Mahzarin Banaji. I applied to work with Mahzarin because she was the one who trained nearly everyone who was doing this kind of work on the origins of social biases. So, I thought that, with her, I could do more research on how kids develop bias. As soon as I got here, I started doing some of that work, and we have a few papers with kids, but also more broadly, I figured out that most of my interests in these early ideas of the origins of biases were all rooted in the questions of where bias comes from and how it changes. Why is it that across evolution, bias seems to be prevalent but only towards some groups? Why is it that children go through these lifespan changes in their biases? From that perspective of change, I started focusing even more at a macro level on these social bias changes that happen in our society. The work of my dissertation—and all the work I will do in my future lab—is still, on some level, focused on those early roots of where bias comes from and how it changes across lifespan, history, and evolution.
SB: It sounds like, for a while, you were exploring and that led you to find out what you are actually interested in.
TC: Yes, and this comes a little bit to the advice-giving part. A lot of people ask, how do you know what type of research you want to do? How do you know, after undergrad, when you are going to be committed to doing a five-year degree, and then doing a postdoc, and then being a faculty member? And honestly, I think you need to do the exploration first. Because once you find that fit, it is very intuitive. It's just so qualitatively distinct, it feels right. I imagine it's a lot like finding your life partner—it's like you're falling in love, and you just know that it feels right.
SB: For those who don’t know yet, can you introduce a bit of your current work? What are some important takeaways from the research that you're doing now?
TC: My research is interested in how and why we change our social biases or social attitudes about other groups—groups defined by race or gender or sexual orientation. My work is trying to understand how manifestations of those kinds of big social biases transform across history. Why is it that certain kinds of beliefs, biases, or attitudes have changed (like our attitudes about people who are gay and lesbian), while others biases (like our attitudes about people with disabilities or people who are elderly) have remained stagnant? What is it about our minds and the way our minds are structured, as well as our society and the way our societies are structured, that allow these different kinds of changes to happen?
For a long time in the field, we knew that explicit biases, the kinds of self-reported biases that are conscious and controllable, could change. That had been established for 70 years of sociological research, but psychology had come around and pointed to more implicit, automatic, and unconscious biases that are more difficult to control and change. It was suggested that they were impossible to shift. And, for a long time, the empirical record was supporting that idea. But in my first project with Mahzarin, we challenged that assumption. We thought that maybe that stickiness that we were seeing is only the case because we were measuring on a very short timescale, around 24 hours or maybe a few days. What would happen if we extended it to a decade? Biases take a long time to change, especially things that are habits of the mind. We know that even at the individual level, habits like smoking take a long time to change. So, that should be the same thing about habits of the mind. In our first paper, the key takeaway was that, when you look at these much longer time spans using big data approaches, you can find changes in implicit bias. So it's not just our explicit biases that are changing but also our implicit biases.
Since then, a second takeaway has been that, although some implicit biases can change, not all of them do. As I mentioned briefly, we have biases about sexual orientation that have changed a lot over the past 15 years, but other biases, like age, disability, and body weight, haven't changed at all. Our work is painting these multi-group nuanced pictures across multiple biases to say that it's not just a ‘yes change / no change’ kind of situation—there’s a much more nuanced explanation of which biases are changing and why.
A third key takeaway is the methodology that we have been bringing to bear on these kinds of questions. To investigate this diversity in patterns of change, we need to have flexible approaches that would allow us to tap into an even more diverse and greater number of biases, so not just race, age, disability, and sexual orientation but the dozens and dozens of social biases that we have towards the dozens and dozens of identities in our world. For example, cancer, breast cancer, whether you have a physical impairment, whether you have a visual impairment, whether you're mute, whether you are a drug dealer, or a gang member, or a teenage parent… all these other stigmas in the world also need to be studied over time.
To extend that flexibility and get a more generalizable approach, we have been using natural language processing models. Basically, we are getting large-scale text data available across 200 years and tracking the kinds of biases that are hidden in our language about all these different social groups. Because we are just using language, we can go bottom-up and ask: “Which groups are we interested in? Let's start studying them,” rather than only having to rely on the kind of archival data that scientists had the forethought to remember to study. Having the flexibility to study those biases, because they are mentioned in language, is another huge contribution that we have made. I think the major limitation I had seen in social psychology was a focus on the here-and-now, or, at best, we would bring participants back for a second session—a week or a month later. But studying hundreds of years of psychological constructs wasn't possible because we didn't have these computer science methods until around the time I started my Ph.D. So, it was really good timing—to be equipped to study these kinds of things, to have the resources and connections at Harvard to be able to study these, and to have the interest to study them from a psychological lens.
SB: What are some exciting questions or lines of research that you see emerging from your work?
TC: Social scientists typically measure attitudes by asking people to report them on a survey or complete an implicit association test. That's how we would usually collect data, but there's another way that my research has been collecting data on these social constructs: through language. And that's a very different kind of phenomenon, right? People are still expressing it by writing about it, but they are doing it to share with other people. It's much more collective in its intentions. A lot of these are books that are meant to be published and disseminated to millions and millions of people. They're not like you reporting your own survey that then might be aggregated up to a collectible. So, I'm really interested in how those two things relate—how do our measures of attitudes that are taken from a single individual relate to language and the collective media? And there have been these long-standing questions of how does language relate to the mind? How do our attitudes relate to what we say? And I think that these different methods that we're using now in this research can start to answer that. Now, we have these rich time series of data from attitudes and rich time series of data from language, and we can see how they overlap. We can ask, does language change precede attitude change, or does attitude change precede language change? What are the time-locked dynamics between these two really big things going on in our society?
SB: It is interesting how this is coming from your innovation in methodology.
TC: That’s exactly right, and the other interesting thing is that we thought those innovations in methods were really important for studying attitudes, but once you pause and think of what we are studying in language, you realize it’s not exactly attitudes or beliefs. There’s something slightly different. So, understanding what we are measuring will be important to see how it is related to attitudes over time. There’s a whole literature on when new forms of language emerge. For example, when the word queer started to be reclaimed and reused, that was thought to be powerful and starting to shift attitudes because it showed a certain degree of power and self-determination from that community. It's the same when the N-words were starting to be less frequently used—some of that was driven by changes in policies, some of that was driven by changes in attitudes. But language itself is changing in a way that will affect attitudes. If there's no longer large-scale use of the n-words, then, suddenly, attitudes are improving as well. So, there are these complex, bi-directional relationships between the ways we're using language, the words we're using in language, the stereotypes we're communicating, and how they affect the associations in our mind.
SB: Moving on to more personal questions now—if you could go back to college, what advice would you give yourself?
TC: This is a really hard question because, on the one hand, everything I've done has led me to the place that I'm at right now, and I'm really happy about it. I'm excited to do the work I'm doing. It gets me up every morning and keeps me awake at night. At the same time, I look back sometimes at other people going through college now, and I wish I could just remind my past self to also ‘just have fun!’
I lived in New York City for college and I hardly explored. I would go for long walks through the city, but I never really ate out, went to concerts, or anything like that. And honestly, even as a grad student, I sometimes missed out on that. And I think it's only in the past few years that I've started to recognize how much that rich, full life brings to your scholarship. It's not only because you have balance and you're able to show up with more vigor the next day, but it's also because you get inspiration in the strangest places—by attending protests, or by attending plays, or by going to a cool restaurant and just watching how the world happens. And I realize that I really zeroed into my studies. There are moments where I wish I just told my younger self ‘it's okay to live a little bit too and get inspiration from those other places.’ Sometimes, it's worthwhile to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and I'm working on that.
But if I could give advice, it would be: it's all going to work out. It's all going to be okay. You can enjoy the process as well. Especially because, as a student at these amazing schools, so much of what you get there are your peers. We have great education, but the point is the other people around you. And I definitely took advantage of it as a grad student. I think my cohort is brilliant, and they all inspired me that way. But I think as an undergrad, I missed out. There were a lot of really cool people that I didn't get to know very well.
SB: What would you like to be remembered for?
TC: In my research, I think I would like to be remembered for a deeper understanding of change. I think it would be cool to deepen our framework for how we think about attitude change at a structural level, as well as how we think about attitude change at an individual level. It would be really exciting to be remembered for these large-scale data approaches that break open what we thought implicit attitudes were and what we thought implicit attitudes have to be about in terms of how they changed.
But when I first came to work with her as a grad student, Mahzarin once said: “My legacy will be my students; my legacy will be with whom I worked.” And, although I think Mahzarin also has a profound legacy in her scholarship and her work, I always loved that focus on her students because it is 100% Mahzarin. She is such an amazing mentor and really cares so deeply about her students. So, I think that I would like to be remembered a little bit for the research, but even more so for the students who I nurture and the accomplishments that they make. It would be very heartwarming to be known as someone who mentored and created a whole new community of scholars.
Are you interested in learning more about Dr. Charlesworth’s work? Check out her website.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
About the Author
Sarah Borges is a sophomore at Harvard College concentrating in Psychology with a secondary in Economics.
SB: What got you interested in psychology?
TC: I never thought I was going to be a psychologist. I had planned on being an architect, since I was about nine years old. My grandparents were architects, and I had a drafting board and an architecture library… so my whole inheritance from my grandparents was to be an architect. For the first two years of college, I was an architecture major, but I wasn't super happy about it. I liked some of the qualities of architecture, mainly that you could bridge the Arts and Sciences. You had the physics and engineering background, but you also had the visual arts, design, and other things. One of the distribution classes that I had to take on the visual, artsy side was an Intro to Psychology course. And amid me feeling like, ‘architecture might not be for me,’ I also started feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh… Introduction to Psychology, this class is amazing.’ This is why I am excited to teach these intro-level courses—I've seen firsthand that they can either really inspire someone to go into the field, or entirely turn them off. I was lucky; I got a professor that really inspired me. From then, I basically decided that I wanted to be a psychologist. But I didn't know what part of psychology I wanted to do.
My first entry in psychology actually started in neuroscience. I worked with Kevin Ochsner (Ph.D.) at Columbia, which is where I did my undergrad in their social cognitive neuroscience area. We were investigating questions related to language and the brain. I worked there for a semester, and then I ended up doing an independent research project with monkeys in Nicaragua. Back then, I was taking classes in evolutionary psychology and the origins of cognition, and there was a cool program that you could take in Nicaragua to run your study in their field sites with the supervision of a professor. So, I got into that program and got funding from Colombia to go. In that program, my research was looking at mimicry between mothers and juvenile monkeys. How do juvenile monkeys learn certain kinds of behaviors, like social behaviors, howling, or grooming behaviors? Do they do it by mimicking their mother, or by mimicking some other female monkey or some other male monkey who is in the vicinity? What's the rate of mimicry? That was a fascinating project to do as a junior in college, but it was also really intense because fieldwork is hard. We were out there for two months and we collected only 25 hours of data. From that experience I again began to wonder, ‘maybe not fieldwork, maybe not evolutionary psychology.’
After that experience in Nicaragua, I studied abroad at Cambridge for a year. While I was there, I worked at a comparative cognition lab where we were working with corvids (crows, essentially). I was still really interested in evolution and early origins. I also did another internship in a developmental lab, where we were looking at theory of mind in young children. That opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about change and development in the origins of cognition. I realized I was more interested in the ontogenetic story than in the evolutionary story. So, I sought out opportunities to work in developmental labs.
The following summer I worked in a developmental lab at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Andrew Baron, who studies the development of social cognition, specifically the development of racial bias and gender bias in early childhood. As soon as I got there, I read some of his papers and they had profound findings of young children developing biases against their own groups at very, very early ages. And it was at that moment that I realized: ‘This is my calling. This is everything that all of these other explorations in psychology have been leading me towards. The research has a little bit of social, of developmental, of cognitive…” All of those things came together. So, I decided to apply to Ph.D. programs in social-cognitive development broadly.
I applied to work mostly with developmentalists, with one exception: Mahzarin Banaji. I applied to work with Mahzarin because she was the one who trained nearly everyone who was doing this kind of work on the origins of social biases. So, I thought that, with her, I could do more research on how kids develop bias. As soon as I got here, I started doing some of that work, and we have a few papers with kids, but also more broadly, I figured out that most of my interests in these early ideas of the origins of biases were all rooted in the questions of where bias comes from and how it changes. Why is it that across evolution, bias seems to be prevalent but only towards some groups? Why is it that children go through these lifespan changes in their biases? From that perspective of change, I started focusing even more at a macro level on these social bias changes that happen in our society. The work of my dissertation—and all the work I will do in my future lab—is still, on some level, focused on those early roots of where bias comes from and how it changes across lifespan, history, and evolution.
SB: It sounds like, for a while, you were exploring and that led you to find out what you are actually interested in.
TC: Yes, and this comes a little bit to the advice-giving part. A lot of people ask, how do you know what type of research you want to do? How do you know, after undergrad, when you are going to be committed to doing a five-year degree, and then doing a postdoc, and then being a faculty member? And honestly, I think you need to do the exploration first. Because once you find that fit, it is very intuitive. It's just so qualitatively distinct, it feels right. I imagine it's a lot like finding your life partner—it's like you're falling in love, and you just know that it feels right.
SB: For those who don’t know yet, can you introduce a bit of your current work? What are some important takeaways from the research that you're doing now?
TC: My research is interested in how and why we change our social biases or social attitudes about other groups—groups defined by race or gender or sexual orientation. My work is trying to understand how manifestations of those kinds of big social biases transform across history. Why is it that certain kinds of beliefs, biases, or attitudes have changed (like our attitudes about people who are gay and lesbian), while others biases (like our attitudes about people with disabilities or people who are elderly) have remained stagnant? What is it about our minds and the way our minds are structured, as well as our society and the way our societies are structured, that allow these different kinds of changes to happen?
For a long time in the field, we knew that explicit biases, the kinds of self-reported biases that are conscious and controllable, could change. That had been established for 70 years of sociological research, but psychology had come around and pointed to more implicit, automatic, and unconscious biases that are more difficult to control and change. It was suggested that they were impossible to shift. And, for a long time, the empirical record was supporting that idea. But in my first project with Mahzarin, we challenged that assumption. We thought that maybe that stickiness that we were seeing is only the case because we were measuring on a very short timescale, around 24 hours or maybe a few days. What would happen if we extended it to a decade? Biases take a long time to change, especially things that are habits of the mind. We know that even at the individual level, habits like smoking take a long time to change. So, that should be the same thing about habits of the mind. In our first paper, the key takeaway was that, when you look at these much longer time spans using big data approaches, you can find changes in implicit bias. So it's not just our explicit biases that are changing but also our implicit biases.
Since then, a second takeaway has been that, although some implicit biases can change, not all of them do. As I mentioned briefly, we have biases about sexual orientation that have changed a lot over the past 15 years, but other biases, like age, disability, and body weight, haven't changed at all. Our work is painting these multi-group nuanced pictures across multiple biases to say that it's not just a ‘yes change / no change’ kind of situation—there’s a much more nuanced explanation of which biases are changing and why.
A third key takeaway is the methodology that we have been bringing to bear on these kinds of questions. To investigate this diversity in patterns of change, we need to have flexible approaches that would allow us to tap into an even more diverse and greater number of biases, so not just race, age, disability, and sexual orientation but the dozens and dozens of social biases that we have towards the dozens and dozens of identities in our world. For example, cancer, breast cancer, whether you have a physical impairment, whether you have a visual impairment, whether you're mute, whether you are a drug dealer, or a gang member, or a teenage parent… all these other stigmas in the world also need to be studied over time.
To extend that flexibility and get a more generalizable approach, we have been using natural language processing models. Basically, we are getting large-scale text data available across 200 years and tracking the kinds of biases that are hidden in our language about all these different social groups. Because we are just using language, we can go bottom-up and ask: “Which groups are we interested in? Let's start studying them,” rather than only having to rely on the kind of archival data that scientists had the forethought to remember to study. Having the flexibility to study those biases, because they are mentioned in language, is another huge contribution that we have made. I think the major limitation I had seen in social psychology was a focus on the here-and-now, or, at best, we would bring participants back for a second session—a week or a month later. But studying hundreds of years of psychological constructs wasn't possible because we didn't have these computer science methods until around the time I started my Ph.D. So, it was really good timing—to be equipped to study these kinds of things, to have the resources and connections at Harvard to be able to study these, and to have the interest to study them from a psychological lens.
SB: What are some exciting questions or lines of research that you see emerging from your work?
TC: Social scientists typically measure attitudes by asking people to report them on a survey or complete an implicit association test. That's how we would usually collect data, but there's another way that my research has been collecting data on these social constructs: through language. And that's a very different kind of phenomenon, right? People are still expressing it by writing about it, but they are doing it to share with other people. It's much more collective in its intentions. A lot of these are books that are meant to be published and disseminated to millions and millions of people. They're not like you reporting your own survey that then might be aggregated up to a collectible. So, I'm really interested in how those two things relate—how do our measures of attitudes that are taken from a single individual relate to language and the collective media? And there have been these long-standing questions of how does language relate to the mind? How do our attitudes relate to what we say? And I think that these different methods that we're using now in this research can start to answer that. Now, we have these rich time series of data from attitudes and rich time series of data from language, and we can see how they overlap. We can ask, does language change precede attitude change, or does attitude change precede language change? What are the time-locked dynamics between these two really big things going on in our society?
SB: It is interesting how this is coming from your innovation in methodology.
TC: That’s exactly right, and the other interesting thing is that we thought those innovations in methods were really important for studying attitudes, but once you pause and think of what we are studying in language, you realize it’s not exactly attitudes or beliefs. There’s something slightly different. So, understanding what we are measuring will be important to see how it is related to attitudes over time. There’s a whole literature on when new forms of language emerge. For example, when the word queer started to be reclaimed and reused, that was thought to be powerful and starting to shift attitudes because it showed a certain degree of power and self-determination from that community. It's the same when the N-words were starting to be less frequently used—some of that was driven by changes in policies, some of that was driven by changes in attitudes. But language itself is changing in a way that will affect attitudes. If there's no longer large-scale use of the n-words, then, suddenly, attitudes are improving as well. So, there are these complex, bi-directional relationships between the ways we're using language, the words we're using in language, the stereotypes we're communicating, and how they affect the associations in our mind.
SB: Moving on to more personal questions now—if you could go back to college, what advice would you give yourself?
TC: This is a really hard question because, on the one hand, everything I've done has led me to the place that I'm at right now, and I'm really happy about it. I'm excited to do the work I'm doing. It gets me up every morning and keeps me awake at night. At the same time, I look back sometimes at other people going through college now, and I wish I could just remind my past self to also ‘just have fun!’
I lived in New York City for college and I hardly explored. I would go for long walks through the city, but I never really ate out, went to concerts, or anything like that. And honestly, even as a grad student, I sometimes missed out on that. And I think it's only in the past few years that I've started to recognize how much that rich, full life brings to your scholarship. It's not only because you have balance and you're able to show up with more vigor the next day, but it's also because you get inspiration in the strangest places—by attending protests, or by attending plays, or by going to a cool restaurant and just watching how the world happens. And I realize that I really zeroed into my studies. There are moments where I wish I just told my younger self ‘it's okay to live a little bit too and get inspiration from those other places.’ Sometimes, it's worthwhile to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and I'm working on that.
But if I could give advice, it would be: it's all going to work out. It's all going to be okay. You can enjoy the process as well. Especially because, as a student at these amazing schools, so much of what you get there are your peers. We have great education, but the point is the other people around you. And I definitely took advantage of it as a grad student. I think my cohort is brilliant, and they all inspired me that way. But I think as an undergrad, I missed out. There were a lot of really cool people that I didn't get to know very well.
SB: What would you like to be remembered for?
TC: In my research, I think I would like to be remembered for a deeper understanding of change. I think it would be cool to deepen our framework for how we think about attitude change at a structural level, as well as how we think about attitude change at an individual level. It would be really exciting to be remembered for these large-scale data approaches that break open what we thought implicit attitudes were and what we thought implicit attitudes have to be about in terms of how they changed.
But when I first came to work with her as a grad student, Mahzarin once said: “My legacy will be my students; my legacy will be with whom I worked.” And, although I think Mahzarin also has a profound legacy in her scholarship and her work, I always loved that focus on her students because it is 100% Mahzarin. She is such an amazing mentor and really cares so deeply about her students. So, I think that I would like to be remembered a little bit for the research, but even more so for the students who I nurture and the accomplishments that they make. It would be very heartwarming to be known as someone who mentored and created a whole new community of scholars.
Are you interested in learning more about Dr. Charlesworth’s work? Check out her website.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
About the Author
Sarah Borges is a sophomore at Harvard College concentrating in Psychology with a secondary in Economics.
