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Mina Cikara (1982-) is a scientist known for studying the psychological change when shifting from the matter of "me and you" to the matter of "us and them." She holds the position of an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in Harvard University, as well as the director at the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab.

Mina Cikara won the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions in 2019. The Spence Award acknowledges the most creative researchers who invents among the best groundbreaking approaches in the field of psychology to serve as an archetype to aspire those who pursue psychology.

"Stereotypes and Schadenfreude: Behavioral and neural markers of pleasure at another's misfortune." by Mina Cikara

Education
Cikara earned her B.S in Vassar College, M.A in Psychology and PhD in Social Psychology and Social Policy both at Princeton University before moving to Massachusetts to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

During her studies as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, she worked under advisor Uri Hasson at Princeton University and advisors Rebecca Saxe and Laura Schulz at MIT simultaneously from June to December of 2010. She then received status as a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow in August 2011, however Cikara stayed in training at MIT until August 2012. Cikara moved on to work as an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences starting in September 2012 until June 2014.

Research
Cikara's research programs are in the studies of Cognition, Brain, & Behavior and Social Psychology. More specifically, she studies how social cognition is altered when a person is considered to be part of a group against another group.. She is currently researching at the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab in Harvard University.

During her research, her and her co-researchers have identified a feeling of schadenfreude, or a feeling of pleasure at another's misfortune, when people are split off into rivaling parties. Two contesting groups create a social distance between both parties, making it more likely that a person will fail to feel empathy for the opposite group. She found that when groups are posed as a threat to one's own, a sense of competition is achieved, causing satisfaction when the opposite group faces hardship and causing defeat at the opposite group's triumph, with no room for empathy to fit in the relationship. This concept was named as the "intergroup empathy bias."

Representative Publications
Cikara, M., & Fiske, S. T. (2013). Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude.

Cikara, M., Botvinick, M. M., & Fiske, S. T. (2011). Us versus them: Social identity shapes neural responses to intergroup competition and harm.

Cikara, M. (2015). Intergroup schadenfreude: Motivating participation in collective violence.