Melissa Ferguson

MELISSA J. FERGUSON is an experimental social psychologist. She received her doctorate in social psychology from New York University in 2002, was a faculty member in the psychology department at Cornell University from 2002-2020, and then joined the psychology department at Yale University in 2020.  Her research focuses on the implicit cognitive processes that enable evaluation, goal-pursuit, self-control, and social behavior.  Three recent topics of research in the lab are how we can update our impressions of others, how we control our behavior, and how we express prejudice.  Her research has appeared in outlets such as Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.