Jamie Amemiya, PhD
Hello and welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Occidental College, where I direct the Development of Thinking Lab. I received my PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UC San Diego (NIH F32 Fellow) and the University of Chicago (NSF SBE Fellow). My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Spencer Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Templeton Foundation (through the Developing Intellectual Humility Network).
My research program broadly focuses on social-cognitive development, with one major line of research focusing on causal attribution as it relates to social cognition, intergroup relations, and achievement motivation. I employ a range of methods, including social-cognitive developmental experiments and educational interventions in real-world settings.
One new direction of research that I am especially excited about is understanding how AI will impact how we manage our reputations and signal warmth and competence to others.
Representative Articles:
Amemiya, J., Mortenson, E., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (2023). Thinking structurally: A cognitive framework for understanding how people attribute inequality to structural causes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18, 259-274. doi:10.1177/17456916221093593
*Donovan, B. M., Weindling, M., *Amemiya, J., Salazar, B., Lee, D., Syed, A., Stuhlsatz, M., & Snowden, J. (2024). Humane genomics education can reduce racism. Science, 383, 818-822. doi: 10.1126/science.adi7895
*Corresponding author.
Amemiya, J., Heyman, G. D., & Gerstenberg, T. (2024). Children use disagreement to infer what happened. Cognition, 250, 105836. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105836
*Popat, A., Amemiya, J., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (2025). Hiding discrimination in plain sight: The development of reasoning about disparate impact policies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
E-mail: amemiya@oxy.edu | Bluesky: @jamieamemiya.bsky.social