Mel Rutherford

I am a professor of psychology with a B.A. from Yale University and a doctorate from UC Santa Barbara. In my professional life and my personal life I work towards Social Justice, and I take an evidence-based approach to issues of equity, diversity and inclusion. We share the goal of creating a safe workplace, but what are the best practices for creating this safe workplace? As psychologists, and as scientists, we have some tools at our disposal to discern which approaches work, and which lead us astray.

The work in my lab is experimental psychology motivated by evolutionary theory. We work on the questions of Social Perception and Social Perceptual Development. We study the perception of social categories, using both face-perception paradigms and essentialist paradigms. We use these approaches to explore evidence-based approaches to equity, diversity and inclusion. We are exploring developing psychological machinery underlying prosocial and moral behavior, and exploring whether we can expand our definition of our ingroup to extend our moral concern to a bigger circle . We study animacy perception, as the first developmental step in social cognition. Using eye-tracking technology, we study the development of autistic characteristics and of the broader autism phenotype.

I stepped into a Glass Cliff opportunity as department chair during a time of crisis and guided my department into resilience and growth. Through values based governance, shared leadership, and consensus decision making, I watched my department turn turbulence into opportunity. I describe this experience in "The Glass Cliff: One Transman's Leadership Odyssey."