Hyeonjin Bak

Hyeonjin Bak is a fourth year PhD student in the Psychology Department. She is broadly interested in using social psychology to understand and identify factors that contribute to confronting prejudice and discrimination. Specifically, her study aims to understand how racial minorities perceive whites' confrontation of racism and to subsequently inform white allies how best to confront racism. By focusing on targets' perspectives rather than the dominant group's perspectives, she reconceptualizes the role and meaning of ally confrontation from one that reduces prejudice (perpetrator-focused) to one that repairs the harm (target-focused). In this current project, she is interested in investigating how perceiving different goals of confrontation shapes whites' confronting behavior.