About

Kyle Ratner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Cornell University, worked as a research assistant at Harvard University, and earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Psychology from New York University. Prior to his current position, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Ohio State University. His research investigates how social contexts interact with cognitive, affective, and biological processes to influence perceptions of others, oneself, and the surrounding world. He is particularly focused on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying intergroup reactions, such as ingroup favoritism, prejudice, discrimination, and stigma, and how these reactions impact social relationships and individual well-being. His work employs methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including fMRI and EEG, to explore topics like face processing influenced by group identities, inference of racism from observed behavior, and the effects of negative stereotypes and prejudice on motivation and collective action.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Neuroscience
• Microeconomics
• Clinical psychology
• Medicine
• Cognitive psychology
• Economics
• Immunology

Selected publications

• Group Bouba–Kiki effects: The interplay of social categorization, competition, and sound symbolism.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-07-10

  articleSenior author

  Over the last several decades, social psychologists who study groups have investigated the extent to which top-down factors (e.g., group membership) interact with bottom-up factors (e.g., low-level aspects of visual perception) to influence social inference. Although it has been widely understood that language is used to communicate social category distinctions through group labels, the contribution of low-level aspects of language has not been considered. This is a potentially consequential oversight because research on sound symbolism has established that the phonemes of words provide inherent meaning. One of the most well-known and robust examples of sound symbolism is the Bouba-Kiki effect, where round-associated sounds (e.g., "Bouba," "Maluma") are associated with round shapes, and sharp-associated sounds (e.g., "Kiki," "Takete") are associated with angular shapes. We examined how sound symbolism and intergroup factors might together give rise to inferences about social groups. Study 1 found that when people are making sense of novel groups to which they are not assigned, then sound symbolism guides their impressions of the groups. Study 2 revealed that in a competitive intergroup context, the sound symbolism effect is diminished or even reversed, and behavior is driven by intergroup bias. Study 3 found that the sound symbolism effect may be partially resilient even in an intergroup context when there is less implied competition between novel groups. Together, this work suggests that although sound structure can carry inherent meaning even when reasoning about novel groups, assignment into groups can alter the inferences that people make about others from phonemic information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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• The self as a representational base: my sense of ‘me’ shapes what I think ‘us’ looks like

  Self and Identity · 2025-08-31

  articleSenior author
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• Psychological effects of anti-Arab politics on American and Arab peoples’ views of each other

  PLoS ONE · 2024-05-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Disparaging rhetoric about Arab people was prevalent during Donald Trump's political rise in the United States. Although this rhetoric was intended to energize conservative Americans, it also echoed throughout many liberal parts of the United States and around the world. In this research, we experimentally examined the effects of such rhetoric on American and Arab people's attitudes and visual representations of each other before and after Trump was elected. Although people overwhelmingly reported not liking the negative rhetoric, the rhetoric alone did not influence explicit and implicit intergroup biases in either location, as measured by feeling thermometers and Implicit Association Tests. However, the election outcome moderated the way rhetoric influenced how American and Arab people visually represented each other. Our research sheds light on nuanced effects of global politics on various information processing stages within intergroup perception.

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• Savoring the sandwich

  Science · 2024-09-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Facial Stereotypes of Competence (Not Trustworthiness or Dominance) Most Resemble Facial Stereotypes of Group Membership

  Social Cognition · 2023-12-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Previous research shows that perceivers have distinct mental representations of ingroups and outgroups even when groups are novel and not defined by physical attributes. Here, we leverage the minimal group paradigm, the reverse correlation method, and machine learning to parse the visual ingredients of group membership. In Study 1, we found that ingroup faces are trusted more than outgroup faces and that facial stereotypes of trustworthiness resemble those of the ingroup/outgroup distinction. However, in Study 2 we showed that such facial stereotypes of group membership resembled those of competence more than trustworthiness and dominance. Together, these findings suggest that even though trustworthiness is an important visual ingredient of the ingroup/outgroup distinction, people may rely on facial cues indicating competence the most to guide their visualization of novel ingroup and outgroup members, highlighting the nuanced nature of ingroup bias in face processing.

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• Scrutinizing Whether Mere Group Membership Influences the N170 Response to Faces: Results from Two Preregistered Event-Related Potential Studies

  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · 2022-07-08 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  A socially consequential test of the cognitive penetrability of visual perception is whether merely sharing a group membership with another person influences how you encode their face. Past research has examined this issue by manipulating group membership with techniques from social psychology and then measuring the face-sensitive N170 ERP. However, methodological differences across studies make it difficult to draw conclusions from this literature. In our research, we conducted two large-scale, preregistered ERP studies to address how critical methodological decisions could influence conclusions about top-down effects of group membership on face perception. Specifically, we examined how mere group membership, perceptual markers that signify group membership, number of trials included in the study design, the racial/ethnic identity of face stimuli, and the data analytic approach affect inferences about the N170 response to faces. In Study 1, we found no evidence that mere group membership significantly influenced the N170. However, we found that the background color used to signify group membership modulated the magnitude and latency of the N170. Exploratory analyses also showed effects of stimulus race/ethnicity. In Study 2, we dissociated background color from face encoding by presenting background color before the faces. In this second study, we found no main effect of group membership, background color, or stimulus race/ethnicity. However, we did see an unhypothesized mere group membership effect on trials toward the end of the study. Our results inform debates about social categorization effects on visual perception and show how bottom-up indicators of group membership can bias face encoding.

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• On vagueness and parochialism in psychological research on groups

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2022-01-01

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  Pietraszewski asserts that social psychological research on groups is too vague, tautological, and dependent on intuitions to be theoretically useful. We disagree. Pietraszewski's contribution is thought-provoking but also incomplete and guilty of many of the faults he attributes to others. Instead of rototilling the existing knowledge landscape, we urge for more integration of new and old ideas.

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• Typhoid vaccine does not impact feelings of social connection or social behavior in a randomized crossover trial among middle-aged female breast cancer survivors

  Brain Behavior and Immunity · 2022 · 6 citations

  • Psychology
  • Medicine
  • Clinical psychology
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• Social Cognition

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology · 2020-08-27

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Contemporary models of how the mind operates and methods for testing them emerged from the cognitive revolution in the middle of the 20th century. Social psychology researchers of the 1970s and 1980s were inspired by these developments and launched the field of social cognition to understand how cognitive approaches could advance understanding of social processes. Decades later, core social psychology topics, such as impression formation, the self, attitudes, stereotyping and prejudice, and interpersonal relationships, are interpreted through the lens of cognitive psychology conceptualizations of attention, perception, categorization, memory, and reasoning. Social cognitive methods and theory have touched every area of modern social psychology. Twenty-first-century efforts are shoring up methodological practices and revisiting old theories, investigating a wider range of human experience, and tackling new avenues of social functioning.

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• Minimal but not meaningless: Seemingly arbitrary category labels can imply more than group membership.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2020 · 27 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  minimal group paradigms to assess how category labels influence minimal group responses. In Study 1, we show that participants represented ingroup faces more favorably than outgroup faces, but also represented overestimator and underestimator category labels differently. In fact, the category label effect was larger than the intergroup effect, even though participants were told that estimation tendencies were unrelated to other cognitive tendencies or personality traits. In Study 2, we demonstrate that Klee and Kandinsky were also represented differently, but in this case, the intergroup effect was stronger than the category label effect. In Studies 3 and 4, we examined effects of category labels on how participants allocate resources to, evaluate, and ascribe traits to ingroup and outgroup members. We found both category label and intergroup effects when participants were assigned to overestimator and underestimator groups. However, we found only the intergroup effect when participants were assigned to Klee and Kandinsky groups. Together, this work advances but does not upend understanding of minimal group effects. We robustly replicate minimal intergroup bias in mental representations of faces, evaluations, trait inferences, and resource allocations. At the same time, we show that seemingly arbitrary category labels can imply characteristics about groups that may influence responses in intergroup contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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Frequent coauthors

• David M. Amodio

  University of Amsterdam

  23 shared

• Ron Dotsch

  Snap (United States)

  17 shared

• Daniël Wigboldus

  Jagiellonian University

  17 shared

• Ad van Knippenberg

  Radboud University Nijmegen

  17 shared

• Siegwart Lindenberg

  13 shared

• Youngki Hong

  Columbia University

  12 shared

• Thomas W. Schubert

  Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

  11 shared

• Diego A. Pizzagalli

  Harvard University

  9 shared