I became a social psychologist because I wanted to make the world a better place.
After taking Introduction to Social Psychology with the legendary McGill professor Donald Taylor, I knew I had found my calling. Taylor—who sadly passed away during the pandemic—was a natural performer and storyteller who inspired countless young Canadian undergraduates to pursue careers in social psychology. For me, Taylor’s material came most alive when he talked about the psychology of prejudice.
Before Taylor’s class, I had not realized there was a big part of an entire discipline devoted to studying discrimination in the hopes of not just understanding it but remedying it. As a Jewish kid, with Holocaust survivors on one side of my family and Yemeni refugees on the other, I had a keen eye for injustice. My family had been on the wrong side of hate more than once, including, I later learned, at the hands of pale-skinned Ashkenazi Jews. My formal education in Jewish history taught me that judging people…
