“The Psychological Power of the Status Quo”Aaron Kay is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Professor Kay's research has focused on the integration of implicit social-cognitive processes with the study of broad social issues. In his primary line of work, he investigates the myriad ways by which people cope with, adapt to, and rationalize social inequalities. At the moment, this research program addresses questions such as: (1) How do people rationalize and justify their good fortune and bad fortune, others’ good fortune and bad fortune, and the social systems that dictate these outcomes? (2) What are the psychological tools employed in aiding people to cope with the internal conflict produced from participating in social systems that are, in many objective ways, unfair and capricious? As a secondary stream of research, Professor Kay examines how social stimuli that we pay little or no attention to in our day to day lives (i.e., nonconcious primes) can influence deliberative social behaviors, such as those that occur in contexts of interpersonal conflict.
The Project on Law and Mind Sciences
