Job title:
Assistant Professor
Department:
Psychology
Bio:
Education: Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research interests:
Racial Inequality, Discrimination, Socioeconomic Inequality, Social Perception
Role:
Full CV:
Contact
Primary Research Area: Social-Personality
*** Recruiting Psychology PhD students for the Fall 2027 admissions cycle ***
Research Description
My research focuses on the "inequality cycle", how unequal social contexts shape psychology and behavior in ways that exacerbate and reinforce economic and racial disparities. By unraveling the inequality cycle, my work contributes to a broader effort aimed at implementing evidence-based interventions to address the negative consequences of inequality. More specifically, I have three ongoing lines of research:
- Distributional Approach: Much of psychological research on inequality has focused on average levels of a construct, such as the overall rate of discrimination in hiring. We know far less about how these constructs are distributed across people, yet distributional questions are fundamental to understanding the behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that maintain inequality. For example: What proportion of people engage in discriminatory decision-making? What are the different antecedents and consequences of discrimination when it is perpetrated by a large vs small proportion of the population?
- Bridging Structural Inequality & Psychology: The social psychological study of racism has predominantly focused on individual prejudice. But racial inequality, like other forms of inequality, is also embedded in society, geography, policy, and history. By connecting data across these sources, my work asks how structural inequality shapes psychology. For example: How does county-level reliance on slavery in 1860 predict discriminatory behavior today? How do county-level differences in racial inequality predict how widespread or concentrated implicit biases are?
- Interventions to Increase Support for Egalitarian Policy: There is no shortage of evidence-based policies for reducing inequality and improving outcomes for marginalized groups. A major barrier to adopting these policies is insufficient public support. My work designs social psychological interventions to increase support for egalitarian policy. For example: How do people perceive the distribution of discrimination and does it predict their policy preferences?
Selected Publications
Galvan, M. J., Payne, B. K., Muscatell, K. A., Rucker, J. M., & Sheeran, P. (2026). Historical slavery predicts contemporary disparities in mortality between Black and White Americans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(33), e2508037123.
Galvan, M. J., Alvarez, G. M., Cipolli, W., Cooley, E., Muscatell, K. A., and Payne, B. K. (2026). Is Discrimination Widespread or Concentrated? Evaluating the Distribution of Anti-Black Discrimination in Judicial, Hiring and Housing Decisions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241288929
Galvan, M. J., Hannay, J., Georgeson, A., Muscatell, K. A., and Payne, B. K. (2023). What does the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status Measure? Separating Economic Circumstances and Social Status to Predict Health. Annals of Behavioral Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaad054
Galvan, M. J., and Payne, B. K. (2024). The Inequality Cycle: How Psychology Helps Keep Economic Inequality in Place. Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241246553.
Galvan, M. J., and Payne, B. K. (2024). Implicit bias as a cognitive manifestation of systemic racism. Daedalus, 153(1): 106-122. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02051