Joshua Aronson is associate professor of developmental, social, and educational psychology, at NYU. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Princeton University. Before coming to NYU, he was on the faculty at the University of Texas and was a postdoctoral scholar and lecturer at Stanford University.
Aronson's research focuses on the social and psychological influences on academic achievement. One of the most widely cited social scientists in the past decade, Aronson is internationally known for his research on "stereotype threat" and minority student achievement, research that offers a strong challenge to traditional genetic and sociological explanations of why African Americans and Latinos perform less well on tests of intelligence than their White counterparts, and why women trail men in hard math and science.
Aronson's research with colleague Claude Steele has been cited in two Supreme Court cases and is considered a modern classic in social psychology, with over 1800 citations in scientific publications. This research showed how stereotypes that allege lower ability among these groups depresses Black and Latino students' test and school performance, and women's comfort and performance in advanced mathematics and science domains.
Aronson has authored numerous chapters and scholarly articles on this work and is the Editor of Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education (Academic Press) and Readings about the Social Animal, (Worth).
His current work focuses on methods of boosting the learning and test performance of underachieving youth. Aronson has received several awards and grants for his research including Early Career awards from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the National Science Foundation, and the G. Stanley Hall Lecturer Award from the American Psychological Association. He was the founding director of the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education at New York University. His forthcoming book is called The Nurture of Intelligence.