Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson is an Assistant Professor at University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business in the Management of Organizations (MORS) group. She completed her doctoral graduate from the (Social) Psychology department at Harvard University in 2020. Before her PhD, she completed her BA in Biology and Psychology from Williams College, doing a thesis under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Randall Crosby on subjective power’s role in predicting the desires of in-group and out-group members. After college, she spent two transformative years as a lab manager for Dr. Jenessa Shapiro in the Social Interaction and Social Stigma Lab at UCLA. She completed her PhD under the guidance of Dr. Jim Sidanius, Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, and Dr. Mina Cikara, and her postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University working with Dr. Jennifer Richeson and Dr. Michael Kraus.

Kiera studies hierarchies: How hierarchies are formed, how they are maintained, and how they intersect. To answer these questions, she focuses on the role of i) empathic and spiteful emotions in supporting intergroup harm, ii) group stereotypes in the experience and perception of prejudice, and iii) motivated reasoning in justifying unequal societal conditions.

Her second line of work examines stereotyping as a mechanism of hierarchy maintenance. She examines the nature of descriptive (what groups are like) and prescriptive (what groups should be like) stereotypes at the intersections of multiple social identities.