Professor Betsy Levy Paluck and librarian Meghan Testerman awarded Data-Driven Social Science Initiative Grant to fund open database of prejudice reduction studies | Princeton University Library

"Professor of psychology and public affairs Betsy Levy Paluck and behavioral sciences librarian Meghan Testerman were recently awarded Princeton’s Data-Driven Social Science Initiative (DDSSI) Grant for their joint proposal, “Prejudice Reduction: Creating an Open Repository of ‘What Works’ from Experimental Research.” 

A decade ago, Paluck and Donald P. Green, professor of political science at Columbia University, composed an essay for the Annual Review of Psychology that addressed the vast literature on prejudice from a new vantage point. Instead of reviewing leading theories of how prejudices are formed and expressed, Paluck and Green (2009) summarized theory and evidence on how to reduce prejudice. The review article immediately attracted scholarly attention and earned a "highly cited" badge on ISI Web of Science. 

That essay’s most salient contribution was to put "prejudice reduction" on the map as a central object of study that speaks to both social science theory and real-world policymaking. Importantly, they linked their essay to a resource that proved to be equally if not more influential—a database that listed and made available for thematic searching the comprehensive list of over 900 studies that they had compiled for the purposes of writing the essay. The database was hosted on Paluck’s personal website and received hundreds of hits per month and has been cited in subsequent work as a resource for scholars reviewing the literature on prejudice reduction and developing new interventions to be tested. In short, the need for a database of studies curated by an expert in the field was clear. ..."