Ariel J. Mosley, Ph.D.

Ariel J. Mosley is an Experimental Social Psychologist and an Assistant Professor of Racial Inequality in the Department of Psychology at the University of California Davis, with affiliation in African American & African Studies. Her research focuses on how group members navigate their social identities and their worlds, and relate to other groups. More specifically, she studies how people think about, respond to, and engage in acts of cultural appropriation, or acts of out-group cultural use. Her research has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Psychological Inquiry, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, among others. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and she has received awards from the International Society of Political Psychology, Psi Chi, the Ernest Becker Foundation, and the American Psychological Association (Divisions 8, 9, 48). 

In 2020, she received her doctoral degree at the University of Kansas as a member of Monica Biernat's Stereotyping and Judgement Lab. Her dissertation examined the factors that lead to different perceptions of cultural appropriation among racially dominant and subordinated groups. She conducted her postdoctoral research career at Columbia University in the Columbia Social and Moral Cognition Lab working with Dr. Larisa Heiphetz. Her work with Dr. Heiphetz investigates how children and adults from different background perceive and experience religious curiosity. 

She received her Bachelors degree in Psychology from California State University Sacramento in 2014. As an undergraduate, she also minored in Philosophy, and studied topics of existentialism and Aristotelian virtue ethics. There, she was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, and conducted her senior thesis, titled, "Gender Discrepancies of Social Facilitation," on the factors that lead women to perform worse on a task in the presence of an audience relative to men. During this time, she was also was a Sally Cassanova Scholar and Leadership Alliance Scholar, which funded her to work with Dr. John Dovidio at Yale University in the Intergroup Relations Lab on issues of sexism and stigma internalization. In 2016, she  was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to examine how individuals derive meaning and benefits from discriminatory experiences. She is also committed to conducting research that is international, intersectional, and culturally representative in scope. In 2018, she received a National Science Foundation GROW award to study judgements of class inequality in at the University of Auvernge in Clermont Ferrand, France.

Over the next several years, her aim is to conduct basic and applied research that promotes social equality, improves intergroup relations, and cultural understanding. She plans to expand her work on cultural appropriation, social identity, and intersectionality, to further investigate how these psychological processes can facilitate ways to reduce intergroup biases and oppression. 

2020                       Ph.D. Psychology, University of Kansas                                                                              

                                      Major Area: Social Psychology 

                                      Dissertation: Perceiving Cultural Appropriation: Race, Racial Group Identity, and Historical Knowledge Affect Labeling of  Actions as   

   Appropriative 

                    Supervisor: Monica Biernat, Ph.D.

2016                      M.A. Psychology, University of Kansas                                                                         

                                     Major: Social Psychology

                                     Masters Thesis: A Subjectivity Uncertainty Theory of Prejudice:  Learning Goals Reduce Expressions of Prejudice      

                                      Supervisor: Mark Landau, Ph.D.

2014                       B.A. Psychology, California State University Sacramento                                               

                                      Major: Psychology

                                      Minor: Philosophy 

   McNair Scholars Program Honors Thesis Title: Gender Discrepancies in Social Facilitation 

                                      Supervisor: Lisa Harrison, Ph.D.

2013                       Leadership Alliance Honors Thesis, Yale University                                             

                                      Leadership Alliance Scholars Honors Thesis Title: Why am I not sexy, smart, and beautiful enough? Women's Internalization of Stigma

                                      Supervisor: Jack Dovidio, Ph.D.