Ariel Mosley is an Assistant Professor of Racial Inequality in the Psychology Department at UC Davis. Her research focuses on how group members navigate their social identities and their worlds, and relate to other groups. More specifically, she studies how people think about, respond to, and engage in acts of cultural appropriation, or acts of out-group cultural use. In 2020, she received her doctoral degree at the University of Kansas as a member of Monica Biernat's Stereotyping and Judgement Lab. Her dissertation examined the factors that lead to different perceptions of cultural appropriation among racially dominant and subordinated groups. She conducted her postdoctoral research career at Columbia University in the Columbia Social and Moral Cognition Lab working with Dr. Larisa Heiphetz. Her work with Dr. Heiphetz investigates how children and adults from different background perceive and experience religious curiosity.

Ariel received her Bachelors degree in Psychology from California State University Sacramento in 2014. As an undergraduate, she also minored in Philosophy, and studied topics of existentialism and Aristotelian virtue ethics. There, she was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, and conducted her senior thesis, titled, "Gender Discrepancies of Social Facilitation," on the factors that lead women to perform worse on a task in the presence of an audience relative to men. During this time, she was also was a Sally Cassanova Scholar and Leadership Alliance Scholar, which funded her to work with Dr. John Dovidio at Yale University in the Intergroup Relations Lab on issues of sexism and stigma internalization.

In 2016, Ariel was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to examine how individuals derive meaning and benefits from discriminatory experiences. She is also committed to conducting research that is international, intersectional, and culturally representative in scope. In 2018, she received a National Science Foundation GROW award to study judgements of class inequality in at the University of Auvernge in Clermont Ferrand, France.

Over the next several years, her aim is to conduct basic and applied research that promotes social equality, improves intergroup relations, and cultural understanding. She plans to expand her work on cultural appropriation, social identity, and intersectionality, to further investigate how these psychological processes can facilitate ways to reduce intergroup biases and oppression.

2020 Ph.D. Psychology, University of Kansas

Major Area: Social Psychology

Dissertation Title: Perceiving Cultural Appropriation: Race, Racial Group Identity, and Historical Knowledge Affect Labeling of Actions as

Appropriative.

2016 M.A. Psychology, University of Kansas

Major: Social Psychology

Thesis Title: A Subjectivity Uncertainty Theory of Prejudice: Learning Goals Reduce Expressions of Prejudice

2014 B.A. Psychology, California State University Sacramento

Major: Psychology

Minor: Philosophy

Honors Thesis Title: Gender Discrepancies in Social Facilitation