Research

My research engages with existential, political, cultural, historical, and critical psychology, using a multi-method approach to understand varied forms of social inequality and how they are perceived, understood, and resisted. Below, I describe my main contributions so far, as well as ongoing projects.

EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY

My interest in social psychology started by reading Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and the empirical investigations of his work through terror management theory. With my PhD advisor Jamie Arndt, I focused on how people deal with existential threats and the ramifications for prejudice and intergroup relations.

In one project (Jimenez et al., 2022, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations), we examined whether existential threats affected people's support for racially equitable health policies. Building from prior work showing that outgroup harm alleviates existential threat (Hayes et al., 2008), we found that White Americans reacted to these threats by becoming less supportive of policies intended to reduce racial health disparities. Furthermore, we found that hearing about these disparities reduced defensive reactions to threat, suggesting that racial health disparities may persist because of their existential meaning to White Americans.

In another line of work, we examined how existential threats affect health attitudes and behaviors. One particularly striking finding was that, much like cancer itself, the extent to which people hold fatalistic attitudes toward cancer is not distributed equally across the United States. As seen in the map below, people across the upper Midwest, southeast and central eastern area tended to agree more strongly with the statement, "When I think of cancer I automatically think of death" (Moser et al., 2020, Psycho-Oncology).

Importantly, these fatalistic beliefs are predictive of fewer intentions to perform preventive behaviors (Moser et al., 2014), which can exacerbate cancer burdens in these already distressed communities.

We found similar pattens in the context of COVID-19 (Jimenez et al., 2020, Social Science & Medicine-Population Health). Surveying US Americans in the spring of 2020, we found that those most vulnerable to the virus, such as "essential workers" without access to sick leave felt the most fatalistic and, as a result, reported lower intentions to wear a mask and social distance.

Additionally, along with Peter J. Helm (Montana State University), I have studied existential isolation (i.e., the feeling that one is alone in their experiences), particularly as it pertains to racial identity (e.g., Helm et al., 2022, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin).

regional bias

Although traditionally understood as an individual-level trait, there is a growing literature that instead views prejudice as a property of groups. This research has been made possible by methodological innovations that allow researchers to collect geo-coded responses from millions of participants and perform geospatial analyses to identify the contextual factors that lead places to become more or less prejudiced, as well as the real-world consequences of regional prejudice (see Calanchini et al., 2022).

I have contributed to this literature in two main ways. First, I extended these ideas to prejudice against Native Americans. In a first paper (Jimenez et al., 2023, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations), which was inspired by the Cleveland Indians' decision to remove their Native American-themed mascot, we found that regional prejudice against Native Americans spiked following this decision, particularly in Ohio (where the team is located).

Second, I have shown that regional prejudice is associated with police militarization, a growing trend in which police are increasingly resembling the military in terms of equipment, tactics, and culture. In this study, we reviewed records from the 1033 Program, which provides surplus military equipment such as armored vehicles and semi-automatic firearms to police departments across the country. Even controlling for factors such as political conservatism and violent crime rates, we found that states higher in regional prejudice tended to acquire more militarized equipment for their police (Jimenez et al., 2022, Psychological Science). The relationship between anti-Black prejudice and police militarization is shown in the figure below.

To help facilitate research on police militarization, I developed the R package MRAP, which helps access and clean 1033 Program data.

neoliberalism

In the US and other nations, the past 50 years have seen a trend toward neoliberal styles of government marked by privatization, deregulation, and a reduction of social goods and services, which has exacerbated economic, health, and other forms of inequality. These socioeconomic trends have shaped psychological experience such that people are increasingly individualistic (see Adams et al., 2019).

Alongside Harrison J. Schmitt (Skidmore College), we have aided the psychological study of neoliberalism by developing a US state-level index of neoliberalism which can be used to examine its social psychological causes and consequences. One such consequence of neoliberalism may be worsened COVID-19 pandemic responses and outcomes. As we argue (Jimenez & Schmitt, 2024, Journal of Political and Social Psychology), neoliberalism undermined pandemic responses by enhancing individualism, precarity, inequality, depoliticization, and penality. Consistent with these ideas, we found that people living in particularly neoliberal US states expressed greater opposition to preventive behaviors and policies and, likely as a result, these states had higher COVID-19 case and mortality rates (Schmitt et al., 2023, Social and Personality Psychology Compass).

In ongoing projects, we are examining how neoliberalism shapes mental health (Jimenez & Schmitt, forthcoming), voting outcomes (Martin, Schmitt, & Jimenez, forthcoming), and policing (Schmitt & Jimenez, forthcoming). Additionally, along with an amazing group of colleagues, we are writing a book examining how neoliberalism uses policing, incarceration, and debt to reassert authority and legitimacy that might otherwise be lost due to austerity, and how these mechanisms of social control affect people's understandings of themselves (Sullivan et al., 2025, Credit, Cops, and Cages: A Theory of Capitalist Individualism).

indigeneity and settler colonialism

Most of my current efforts are geared toward developing a critical cultural psychological theory of settler colonialism which helps understand the seemingly paradoxical ways in which Native Americans are viewed and treated. On the one hand, Natives are often romanticized, while on the other hand they are subjected to institutional and interpersonal forms of discrimination and violence. In a forthcoming book (working title, Threat and Guilt: A Critical Cultural Psychological Theory of Settler Colonialism), I argue that this paradoxical treatment stems from two cultural orientations which have developed over the past 500 years. The first orientation, threat, is motivated by geographical and temporal proximity to Native peoples and in turn motivates prejudice, discrimination, and violence. The second orientation, guilt, is motivated by geographical and temporal distance and in turn motivates denial, disavowel, and deidentification.

Additionally, I have studied the causes and consequences of anti-Native prejudice. In one paper, we found that the removal of Native American-themed sports mascots can provoke backlash in the form of increased prejudice (Jimenez et al., 2023, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations). As I have argued in the media, this does not imply that these mascots should be retained (many studies have demonstrated their harmfulness), but rather that institutions should be equipped to counter this trend and provide resources to Native peoples who may be subjected to harassment and discrimination. This backlash is one component of what my colleagues and I describe as a cycle of Indigenous identity threat (Lopez et al., 2025).

The impact of settler colonialism on Native peoples cannot be overstated, as evidenced by the many physical and mental health disparities that Native peoples continue to face. As cultural disruption is at the heart of these problems, cultural revitalization offers a potential solution. In one paper (Lewis et al., 2020, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples), my colleagues and I studied the Remember the Removal program, in which Cherokee youth learn about Cherokee language, culture, and history, as well as complete a thousand mile bike ride along one of the routes of the Trail of Tears. We found that people who participated in this program internalized Cherokee values, which led to lasting improvements in the well-being, even decades after their participation.

Some other ongoing projects examine the psychosocial consequences of blood quantum laws (Swiger & Jimenez, forthcoming), the historical phenomenon of "Indian Scares" (Lies & Jimenez, forthcoming), and a GIS-based analysis of historical stereotypes (Dai & Jimenez, forthcoming).

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