Professorof Psychology Nalini Ambady was recently chosen to be a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a nonprofit group that promotes science around the world.
"I think it's a great honor [and] I'm delighted," Ambady said. "It's ... a fairly select group of scientists."
A total of 471 members of the AAAS were elected as Fellows out of a membership base of over 117,000. They joined over 7,000 other Fellows this October. Eleven of the newcomers were recognized in the field of psychology.
The AAAS cited Ambady's "distinguished contributions in the field of social psychology" and his "innovative and groundbreaking research on person perception and nonverbal communication."
Fellow nominations are generally submitted by those who already hold that rank. Nominees then undergo an extensive review process within different committees of the AAAS.
According to Molly McElroy, a communications officer for the AAAS, the peer-selection aspect of the honor is especially meaningful for those elected.
"It's ... a recognition among peers," she said. "That's probably one of the more flattering points about this award to them. As far as I can tell, it distinguishes them from many other scientists."
Ambady heads the Interpersonal Perception and Communication (IPC) Lab in Tufts' psychology department. She conducted her studies on person perception and nonverbal communication at Tufts, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2004. She was previously at Harvard.
According to Ambady, the primary focus of her research "is how we make judgments of other people in our daily lives and the accuracy of those judgments."
She is especially well-known for her work regarding the relationship between cognition and culture, and for her studies about susceptibility to stereotypes.
Provost Jamshed Bharucha said that Ambady has promoted student involvement in this groundbreaking research.
"She has a lot of ... undergraduate and graduate students working with her, so she's having an impact not only on research but on her students as well," he said.
Some of Ambady's research conducted at her IPC Lab looks at how stereotypes affect judgments.
One of Ambady's studies dealt with the susceptibility of Asian students to stereotyping and the effects of certain stereotypes on quantitative performance.
Her research has shown that, typically, when the stereotype that Asians are strong quantitatively is subtly suggested to a female Asian student, she will perform well on a math test, but when the opposite stereotype is suggested, performance level decreases.
Bharucha said that this particular study has had far-reaching repercussions.
"This has very powerful implications for education [and] for promoting science education among girls, because society's stereotypes seem to be inadvertently internalized," he said. "We have to find ways to break out of that."
Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, another AAAS Fellow, said that Ambady is also a leader in the area of "thin slices," or brief observations of behavior.
She and Robert Rosenthal, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, "practically invented the field," Sternberg said. "This work shows that even extremely small exposures to a person predict with surprising accuracy how you will feel about that person after much more interaction."
Ambady demonstrated this by showing students short, muted clips of professors teaching a class.
Though the clips lasted only a few seconds, the students were able to make judgments about the professors' teaching abilities that were nearly identical to those made by students who had taken semester-long classes with them.
Ambady will be officially recognized as a Fellow at a special reception during the AAAS's next annual meeting, which will be held in Boston in February.
