Jamie Amemiya, PhD

Hello and welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Occidental College. I am broadly interested in the development of social cognition as it relates to how children and adults think about societal problems. My current research interests include how children and adults reason about the causes of social inequality, how they represent social categories and societal hierarchies, and their reasoning about why people disagree. Broader topics of interest include causal reasoning, counterfactual thinking, science education, social categorization, and achievement motivation. 

Representative Articles:

• Amemiya, J., Mortenson, E., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (2023). Thinking structurally: A cognitive framework for understanding how people attribute inequality to structural causes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18, 259-274. doi:10.1177/17456916221093593 PDF

• *Donovan, B. M., Weindling, M., *Amemiya, J., Salazar, B., Lee, D., Syed, A., Stuhlsatz, M., & Snowden, J. (2024). Humane genomics education can reduce racism. Science, 383, 818-822. doi: 10.1126/science.adi7895 

*Corresponding author. PDF (open access)

• Amemiya, J., & Bian, L. (2024). Why are there no girls? Increasing children’s recognition of structural causes of the gender gap in STEM. Cognition, 245, 105740. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105740 PDF

• Amemiya, J., Heyman, G. D., & Gerstenberg, T. (in press). Children use disagreement to infer what happened. Cognition. PDF

Check out my current projects here!

About Me | Publications | CV | Google Scholar

E-mail: amemiya@oxy.edu | Twitter: @JamieAmemiya