Kate A. Ratliff

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Kate A. Ratliff, Ph.D. is an assistant professor and the social psychology area director in the Department of Psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She also is the executive director of the non-profit organization Project Implicit..... She was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1981.

Education

Kate Ratliff earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. During her time in college, she became involved in Amnesty International and began to participate in anti-death penalty work. Through this work, she became aware of the concept of structural racism that is inherent in the US criminal justice system. Ratliff studied race and racism through a sociology minor but found the psychological approach to the topic more appealing. In analyzing the statistics of people incarcerated in the United States, and with the understanding that the number of people on death row was disproportionately black, Ratliff studied the relationship between implicit prejudice and support for capital punishment for her senior thesis.

In 2006, Ratliff earned her Master of Arts degree in Social Psychology from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She focused her studies on the separation of automatic and controlled processes in the expression of attitudes. She continued at the University of Virginia to earn her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Social Psychology. Her dissertation focused on implicit and explicit attitude generalization. She continues to study implicit bias through the University of Virginia today.

Positions

Dr. Ratliff began her career as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University in 2009 and held this position until 2012. She became an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Psychology in 2012, where she teaches and researches to this day. She began working with Project Implicit as the Director of Research and Education in 2013, and she became Executive Director of the organization in 2015. Dr. Ratliff also became an affiliate for the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies for the University of Florida in 2014. As an assistant professor at the University of Florida, Dr. Ratliff has taught both undergraduate level courses, including Intro to Social Psychology, Stereotyping and Prejudice, Attitudes and Social Cognition, Attitudes and Communication, and graduate level courses, including Social Psychology Colloquium, Social Perception, Seminar in Attitudes, and Social Psychology Theories. She also leads an Attitudes and Social Cognition lab group

Research

Through her involvement with Amnesty International and her increased interest in prejudice, Ratliff became aware that her childhood environment blinded her of her privilege and that she had been ignorant to the concepts of racial and gender bias. Her research involves prejudice and stereotyping, social cognition, implicit cognition, evaluative conditioning, attitude formation, associative learning, and feminist identity. Dr. Ratliff’s research interests align similarly to what she believes are significant societal issues, making her work feel more meaningful.

At the beginning of her research career, however, Dr. Ratliff’s work did not always focus on an impactful psychological relationship. She was intent on building up her curriculum vitae, choosing research topics that were fast and easy to produce. Recently, Dr. Ratliff received tenure, which gives her more freedom to focus on more meaningful work with real-world impact.

Currently, Dr. Ratliff’s greatest impact on society is through educating the public on the results of her research in implicit attitudes. This idea of spreading awareness can be seen through a current project of hers, where she and other researchers have developed an implicit bias education program involving online modules. This program has been administered to the incoming University of Virginia freshmen classes of 2021 and 2022. Her program, administered through Project Implicit, tests if people can be educated about implicit bias and to bring awareness to the issues related to it. Dr. Ratliff considers this program to be one of her most accomplished projects, as it results in the most practical, real-world implications by involving thousands of students at both the University of Virginia and the University of Florida.

Other research projects of hers involve measurements of human behavior as well. She has studied environmental attitudes, analyzing people’s willingness to donate money to environmental organizations. Dr. Ratliff considers the research that produces a tangible outcome is the most significant in contributing to understanding how people’s minds work, and then using that data to find relationships in human behavior.

The main concerns of Dr. Ratliff’s research are implicit biases and attitudes. She researches the subconscious judgments people make about others that they are unwilling or unable to admit. Many of the people within Dr. Ratliff’s realm of study do not even realize they harbor negative attitudes pertaining to prejudice, social hierarchy, and stereotyping. Her studies emphasize that because people’s explicit attitudes often follow the norms of social and societal expectations, they do not realize how their implicit bias affects decision-making and daily actions. These attitudes also have a significant role in the topics of human relationships, feminism, health, environmental concerns, and morality. She works to raise awareness through her studies because of this pervasiveness of unrealized bias. Ongoing research topics taking place within her lab include, but are not limited to attitude transfer, implicit prototypes and behavior, defensive responses to feedback on implicit attitudes, and attitudes towards transgender people, white privilege

Dr. Ratliff’s job as a psychological researcher allows her to do many different tasks, and no two days at work are the same for her. Her work at the University of Florida entails teaching classes, mentoring graduate students, and doing research. As a researcher, her job includes data analysis, writing, programming, and other different activities. The daily variability is what she enjoys best about her career.

Project Implicit

Dr. Kate Ratliff works as the executive director for Project Implicit, a non-profit organization with a focus on implicit social cognition and education the public about their own subconscious biases through numerous IATs, or Implicit Association Tests. This organization works through international collaboration between researchers and scientists studying and discovering novel ways to understanding hidden biases and stereotypes that influence human behavior. This data is turned into everyday applications to address common topics like diversity, decision-making, and values

The IAT is an integral part of Project Implicit and informing the public about the negative biases they may harbor. It measures the strength of correlation between concepts and stereotypes, such as minority groups and evaluations like ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The resulting score from completing these multiple-part tests describe the test-takers associations as ‘slight,’ ‘moderate,’ or ‘strong.’ However, these results of implicit preference do not necessarily match with what one consciously believes or expresses in their behavior at any one point in time. But, the IAT can predict actions taken related to discrimination or criminal justice decisions. Project Implicit also provides feedback and information to help the public combat the effects of their implicit preferences

Publications

Dr. Ratliff has at least 38 peer-reviewed publications and has written public articles for The Gainesville Sun and The Conversations and has had reprints in the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Further, her research has been covered in several media sources, including National Geographic, Science, Nature, New York Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, WebMD, The Today Show, The Guardian, and outlets in numerous countries across the globe. Dr. Ratliff has editorial experience with the British Journal of Social Psychology, Social Cognition, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Dr. Kate Ratliff as a Woman in STEM (WikiProject Women scientists)

Often, women are the minority in STEM fields and careers, and as a result of years of stereotypes and expectations, often face sexism and discrimination in the workplace or laboratory. While Dr. Ratliff studies the impact of bias in a similar sense, she understands that she is not part of the numerical minority as a female psychological researcher. Thus, she does not feel that she has experienced the same challenges as women in other sciences such as biology or chemistry. However, that does not mean she does not question if certain circumstances occur because of her gender and age.

Dr. Ratliff offers advice to other women in the STEM fields:

“Just know that you can do it. It’s hard, and I think that a lot of STEM careers are harder for women, but it’s not impossible; it’s not an unattainable thing.”

Dr. Ratliff has two children of her own and works to balance spending time with her family and her career at the University of Florida. She feels that many women believe that they have to choose between having a family and a career, but in reality, she has discovered that is not the case and it is possible to make it work.

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