About

Sophie Trawalter is a Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on psychological phenomena related to diversity, particularly how individuals develop competencies for life in diverse spaces. She has studied the dynamics of intergroup contact, group-based social cognition, and group-based social ecology. Her work aims to address important questions such as how to make the lived realities of Black Americans more visible to White Americans, how to improve the quality and outcomes of interracial interactions, and how to increase the sense of place for historically stigmatized group members in discriminatory institutions. Her overarching goal is to reduce intergroup tensions and improve life outcomes for both stigmatized and non-stigmatized groups.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Demography
• Epistemology
• Ancient history
• History
• Criminology
• Clinical psychology

Selected publications

• On Why White College Students Confront Online Racism and Why They Do Not: Insights From a Multi‐site Intervention

  Journal of Social Issues · 2026-05-07

  article

  ABSTRACT In the current study, we examined White students’ responses to open‐ended questions about why they chose to confront or not confront online racism after they were randomly assigned to receive the intervention condition (i.e., a video‐based interactive intervention about confronting online racism) or the control condition (i.e., an attention control condition designed to be similar to the format of the intervention condition but focused on raising awareness of and mitigating one's own implicit bias). We coded responses from 720 White students attending one of four predominantly White institutions and compared the distribution of codes between the intervention and control conditions. Among participants who confronted, those in the intervention group were more likely than those in the control group to report feeling confident in how to confront. Among participants who did not confront, participants in the control condition were more likely to report that they believed confrontations are ineffective. The findings underscore the importance of attitudes (believing that confrontations can be effective) and self‐efficacy (knowing what to say) in facilitating confrontations.

  PublisherDOI

• Gender Differences in Law School Classroom Participation: The Key Role of Social Context

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Gendered Colorism: Evidence From Social Categorization Studies

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2025-04-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The present work documents gendered colorism using social categorization paradigms. Specifically, we document how skin tone influences gender categorization, especially for Black women relative to Black men across a diverse sample in three studies ( N = 443). We find that darker skin consistently facilitates fast and accurate racial categorization (Studies 1–3), and that skin tone has a larger effect on the accurate gender categorization of Black women versus men (Studies 1–2), with darker-skinned women being categorized the slowest and least accurately. Together, these findings suggest that gendered colorism may be most prominent when gender (but not race) is salient. They point to another way that Black women potentially experience intersectional invisibility, when their gender identity goes unrecognized and unacknowledged. Further research examining evaluative judgments is needed to examine this connection.

  PublisherDOI

• Critiquing and Reimagining Belonging in Public Spaces in Higher Education

  Educational Psychology Review · 2025-08-23 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Students from lower socioeconomic status and historically racially minoritized groups are less likely to go to college; if they go, they are less likely to graduate. Part of the reason is due to money and access to educational opportunities. We contend that another reason is because these institutions, created by and for White elites, have left everyone else feeling like outsiders—socially, culturally, and spatially. In the current review, we focus on the spatial dimension. We draw from human geography, urban planning, architecture, and related fields, and propose that the university campus is a territorial, surveilled, and symbolic space, in ways that leave marginalized students feeling like trespassers on campus. We then review existing evidence and offer new evidence that the physical setting of university life—the university campus—can make marginalized students feel out of place. We conclude that if universities are serious about their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in their mission to be the engine of economic mobility, they must change, in part, by reimagining physical spaces.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black and White Americans’ Perceptions of Community Equity Efforts Diverge Following the Removal of Confederate Monuments

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2024-03-26 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Communities across the United States are removing Confederate monuments from public spaces. Little work, however, has considered downstream consequences of these decisions. Across three experiments and four replications in Supplemental Material, we examine impacts of community decisions on individuals’ perceptions of communities’ efforts toward racial equity. We find that the removal of monuments leads White Americans—but not Black Americans—to believe that communities will sufficiently prioritize policies aimed at redressing racial inequity in the future. Taken together, these findings suggest that the symbolic removal of Confederate monuments may signal different structural equity investments to different constituencies, with Whites anticipating that communities will engage in sufficient racial equity policy efforts and Black Americans remaining skeptical.

  PublisherDOI

• On the Role of Police Shootings, Recognition of Systemic Racism, and Empathy on White Americans’ Support for Police Reform

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2024-03-27 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  The police kill Black Americans at disproportionate rates. Despite this, White Americans remain mixed on support for policing-related policy reform. We examined whether bearing witness to police violence leads to support for policy reforms. Across three studies ( N = 943), White participants either viewed a news video about an unarmed Black man killed at the hands of police or in a car accident due to a collision with another driver. Participants lower but not higher in symbolic racism reported more empathy after viewing a police shooting (vs. car accident) news video (Studies 1–3). Empathy predicted policing-related policy reform support (Studies 1–3) and mediated the relationship between condition and policy reform support (Studies 1 and 3), among those lower in symbolic racism (Studies 1–2). Results suggest that empathy for Black victims of police violence predicts policy support but only among those who recognize that such violence is systemic in nature.

  PublisherDOI

• Critical race theory and COVID‐19 vaccination: An experimental test of interest convergence

  Journal of Social Issues · 2024-05-02 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers crucial insights into the persistence of racism. The theory also identifies the conditions under which White Americans will support policies aimed at redressing racial inequities. According to the tenet of interest convergence, White Americans will support policies aimed at redressing racial inequities when it serves their interests to do so; that is, when their interests converge with those of Black people. Here, we provide an experimental test of interest convergence in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Consistent with interest convergence, we find that White support for race‐conscious policies aimed at redressing COVID‐19 inequities increased when policies were framed as benefiting White people (i.e., a benefits frame). White support decreased when policies were framed as only benefiting Black people and was unmoved by a frame that accentuated systemic racism. Further, the impact of the benefit frame was not moderated by racial attitudes or political ideology. The results offer a sobering reminder that racial progress does not necessarily reflect shifts in White people's prejudice and consciousness, but rather shifts in their interests.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The invisible man: A replication study investigating whether interpersonal goals moderate White women’s inattentional blindness to African American men

  Group Processes & Intergroup Relations · 2023-07-10 · 9 citations

  article

  Anti-Black racism in America renders Black people both invisible and hypervisible, at times. Here, we draw on previous research on inattentional blindness, a phenomenon whereby people fail to perceive something or someone (e.g., a person walking about) in their environment when attending to another feature of their environment (e.g., other people playing a ball game). We sought to replicate past work examining the conditions under which heterosexual White women fail to perceive a Black man walking through a complex scene. Specifically, we investigated whether selective inattention to a task-irrelevant person walking through a scene of two teams passing basketballs may depend on two factors: (a) the race of the person walking through the scene (Black vs. White), and (b) the interpersonal goal of the viewer (searching for a coworker, neighbor, friend, romantic partner, or a control condition)—hence the reason we recruited heterosexual White women participants. Consistent with the original work, across three studies, we found a main effect of target race such that heterosexual White women participants were more likely to notice the White (vs. Black) man walking through the ball-passing scene. Inconsistent with the original work, we did not find that this effect was moderated by the interpersonal goal condition. We discuss the implications of the current findings and future directions.

  PublisherDOI

• What black people value when white people confront prejudice

  The Journal of Social Psychology · 2023-03-02 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Previous research in psychology has focused on how confronting racial prejudice affects White people - White perpetrators and bystanders - and reduces their prejudice. We shift the focus to Black people - Black people targeted by prejudice and Black observers - and examine how Black people perceive White people's confrontations. Two hundred forty-two Black participants evaluated White participants' responses to anti-Black comments (i.e., confrontations), which were text-analyzed and content-coded to identify the characteristics that Black participants valued the most. Analyses revealed that Black participants valued confrontations that were coded as direct, targeting the action, labeling the prejudiced action as such, and connecting individual acts of prejudice to systemic racism. Notably, this style of confrontation is not what research suggests is best for White people, for reducing Whites' prejudice. Accordingly, the present work contributes to our understanding of confronting prejudice and the value of centering Black experiences and perspectives rather than White comfort and prejudice.

  PublisherDOI

• Confrontations black people value

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2023-02-12

  otherSenior author
  Publisher

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F32HD055772

  NIH · $110k · 2010

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer A. Richeson

  Yale University

  22 shared

• Kelly M. Hoffman

  Equality Now

  16 shared

• J. Nicole Shelton

  Princeton University

  7 shared

• Jordan Axt

  McGill University

  6 shared

• Brian A. Nosek

  Center for Open Science

  5 shared

• James N. Druckman

  University of Rochester

  5 shared

• Jazmin L. Brown‐Iannuzzi

  5 shared

• Matt Motyl

  4 shared