Jamie Amemiya, PhD

Hello and welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Occidental College. I am broadly interested in the development of social cognition as it relates to how children and adults think about societal problems. My current research interests include how children and adults reason about the causes of social inequality, how they represent social categories and societal hierarchies, and their reasoning about why people disagree. Broader theoretical topics of interest include causal reasoning, counterfactual thinking, social categorization, and achievement motivation. 

Representative Articles:

• Amemiya, J., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (in press). Emphasizing others’ persistence can promote unwarranted social inferences in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. PDF

• Amemiya, J., *Widjanarko, K., *Chung, I., Bian, L., & Heyman, G. D. (in press). Children can represent complex social status hierarchies: Evidence from Indonesia. Child Development. PDF

• Amemiya, J., Mortenson, E., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, C. M. (in press). Thinking structurally: A cognitive framework for understanding how people attribute inequality to structural causes. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi: doi.org/10.1177/17456916221093593 PDF

• Amemiya, J., Mortenson, E., Ahn, S., Walker, C. M., & Heyman, G. D. (2022). Children acknowledge physical constraints less when actors behave stereotypically: Gender stereotypes as a case study. Child Development, 93, 72-83. doi:10.1111/cdev.13643 PDF 

• Amemiya, J., Walker, C. M., & Heyman, G. D. (2021). Children’s developing ability to resolve disagreements by integrating perspectives. Child Development, 92, e1228-e1241. doi:10.1111/cdev.13603 PDF

Check out my current projects here!

About Me | Publications | CV | Google Scholar

E-mail: amemiya@oxy.edu | Twitter: @JamieAmemiya