CMEI Colloquium
Larsen Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education
September 23, 2013
While instances of inter-communal violence and genocide are common and immensely tragic, what is not as readily appreciated is the widespread extent and ferocity of the intergroup violence that is channeled through legal and criminal justice systems. Given the fact that the legal and criminal justice systems are disproportionately controlled by members of dominant rather than subordinate social groups, social dominance theory argues that a substantial portion of the output of the criminal justice system can be seen as a form of intergroup violence, the function of which is to maintain the structural integrity of group-based social hierarchy.
Speaker Biography:
James Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His primary research interests include the interface between political ideology and cognitive functioning, the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.
