Assistant Professor
Director: Cognition Across Development Lab
Biographical Sketch
Tara Mandalaywala received her PhD in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago in 2014. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at New York University from 2014 – 2018. Before joining the BU faculty, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2018 – 2024.
Selected Publications
- Tian, Y., Gonzalez, G., & Mandalaywala, T.M. (2024). Beliefs about social mobility in young American children. Developmental Science.
- Shahbazi, G., Samani, H., Mandalaywala, T. M., Borhani, K., & Davoodi, T. (2024). The development of social essentialist reasoning in Iran: Insight into biological perception, cultural input, and motivational factors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.
- Mandalaywala, T. M., & Legaspi, J. K. (2023). Automatic encoding across social categories in American children and adults. Developmental Psychology, 59(12), 2296–2303.
- Mandalaywala, T. M. (2022). Do nonhuman animals reason about prestige-based status? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16(4), e12660.
- Mandalaywala, T. M., Tai, C., & Rhodes, M. (2020). Children’s use of race and gender as cues to social status. PLoS ONE, 15(6), Article e0234398.
- Mandalaywala, T.M., Ranger-Murdock, G., Amodio, D.M. and Rhodes, M. (2019), The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood. Child Development, 90: e437-e453.
- Mandalaywala, T. M., Parker, K. J., & Maestripieri, D. (2014). Early Experience Affects the Strength of Vigilance for Threat in Rhesus Monkey Infants. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1893-1902.