Hazel Rose Markus

Hazel R. Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, where she is also Director of the Stanford Research Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Markus is a pioneering figure in cultural psychology, a field which explores how cultural contexts both shape and reflect individuals' emotions, cognitions, motivations, and other psychological processes. Markus' most significant contribution to social psychology was the introduction of the concept of the "self-schema." She described the self-schema as a cognitive representation of the self that is used to organize knowledge about the self and guide processing of self-relevant information. Her recent research includes biracial identity, where she found that for ethnicity reports on forms such as the SAT or the census, if a biracial person is not allowed to choose to identify with more than one race, their self-esteem lowers. Markus has also completed research on differences between East-Asian and European-American cultural norms, as well as biological differences that occur from different cultural perspectives and practices. She served as president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2003-4.