Tara Mandalaywala
Assistant Professor

- Title Assistant Professor
- Email tmanda@bu.edu
- Education PhD, University of Chicago
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. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13527
- 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001616
- Mandalaywala, T. M., & Legaspi, J. K. (2023). Automatic encoding across social categories in American children and adults. Developmental Psychology, 59(12), 2296–2303. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001578
- Mandalaywala, T. M. (2022). Do nonhuman animals reason about prestige-based status? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16(4), e12660. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12660
- 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234398
- 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. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13008
- 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. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614544175