Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

Distinguished Professor Gordon Hodson has spent the past 25 years studying prejudice in many forms, from racist and misogynist beliefs to biases against vegans and animals.

His research innovations have made a global impact on the study of prejudice, including intergroup contact and dehumanization. Hodson was recently recognized for his ongoing contributions to the field, joining nine other faculty members from across Brock in receiving the new Distinguished Professor designation.

Hodson came to Brock’s Department of Psychology in 2004 from Swansea University in the U.K. He was trained in the subfield of social psychology but has long drawn on personality psychology in his approach, even though the two subdisciplines at times make for strange bedfellows.

“Social psychology concentrates on how situations differ, whereas personality psychology concentrates on how people differ — a distinction that really matters to the prejudice field,” says Hodson. “I’ve long advocated that both personal and situational factors are critical to understanding prejudice, and although my position on this matter once made me a bit of an outsider, it has now become much more mainstream.”

Hodson and his team in the Brock Intergroup Attitudes Scholarship (BIAS) Laboratory have helped drive that evolution. His 2015 paper with Kristof Dhont, “The person-based nature of prejudice: Individual difference predictors of intergroup negativity,” was the first personality-focused paper ever published in the European Review of Social Psychology and has been cited more than 150 times.

Hodson continues to walk the line between social psychology and individual differences, having shown in a recent co-authored paper in American Psychologist that reducing prejudice between groups may have more to do with individual differences than the contact itself.

“I’m currently co-writing a paper where we argue that the field needs to think more carefully about the myriad ways that contact effects can unfold over time,” he says. “Digging into these issues at this point in my career has been truly exciting. I feel truly blessed to work with such great people on such interesting ideas.”

Hodson, with former PhD student Kimberly Costello, also developed the Interspecies Model of Prejudice, which he says shows that “how humans think about animals must be to related to how people represent other groups as animal-like.” His interest in human-animal relations then led to Hodson’s 2020 book, also with Dhont, Why We Love and Exploit Animals.

Hodson says that “considering how and why prejudices are interconnected” has been crucial to his growth as a prejudice researcher.

“One of the lessons that I’ve learned is that prejudices are positively correlated with each other — for instance, the more someone dislikes immigrants, the more they tend to dislike LGBT people, women, racial minorities and also animals,” says Hodson. “Of course, this connectivity also has implications for how to reduce prejudice.”

In addition to his most recent honour, Hodson was awarded the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock in 2015, and he is an elected Fellow with the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. According to a public database of the world’s most frequently cited scientists, Hodson was the second-most cited researcher at Brock in 2022.

But he also makes a point of sharing his work with broad audiences, writing a popular column about prejudice for Psychology Today for almost a decade.

Hodson says he still finds himself jumping out of bed sometimes to jot down research notes, such is his excitement for the topic of prejudice. But central to these pursuits is his belief that prioritizing and fostering relationships with collaborators and students has had a major impact on his ability to pursue these interests.