John Tawa Mount Holyoke College, USA

John Tawa is an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College.  John's research, broadly speaking, examines the role of race in intergroup interactions. More specifically, John is interested in relations between minority groups (e.g., relations between Black and Asian communities). Some of his research supports the idea that perceived competition for resources (e.g., educational, economic) creates greater distance between Black and Asian group members relative to both their distances towards the White majority group. A second line of John’s research examines how people’s essentialist beliefs about race influence their intergroup behaviors.  For example, this research has demonstrated that people who think of race as biologically distinct (i.e., racial essentialism) tend to experience less comfort and less peer interaction with racial outgroup members. Methodologically, John is interested in directly assessing people's "real-time" behavior, in lieu of a primary reliance on self-reported behavior.  Most recently, John has been using immersive virtual reality to examine how physiological stress and visual attention patterns predict police officers’ decisions to use lethal force.