Three social scientists affiliated with The Ohio State University Department of Psychology have received the prestigious Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation in Bilbao, Spain.

Professor Richard Petty, former professor Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji ’86 PhD joined 17 other influential researchers and creatives from around the world to accept the honor at a June 19 celebration.

“This ceremony is an exceptional opportunity to highlight what truly unites and enriches us as human beings: the ability to generate new knowledge to interpret our physical, biological and social reality,” Carlos Torres Vila, President of the BBVA Foundation, said during the event, according to a press release.

Now in its 17^th year, the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognize individuals across the sciences, arts and humanities whose research and creations have led to significant advances, according to the BBVA Foundation announcement —in other words, work that advances “the frontiers of the known world.”

Alongside Icek Ajzen, an emeritus professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Dolores Albarracín, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Petty, Greenwald and Banaji have been recognized specifically for their influential work on human attitudes and behaviors.

Petty, who was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, received the Frontiers of Knowledge award for his research about persuasion. With John Cacioppo, he developed the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a prominent theory that explains how people process information and are influenced to change their minds. The model suggests, for example, that the more someone thinks about a persuasive message, the more likely their attitude is to change in a lasting way.
 

In his acceptance speech, Petty underscored the importance of research on attitudes and persuasion.

“Recognition for scientific work in psychology is critical if humanity is to continue to advance,”  he said. “For example, understanding how attitudes toward science itself were formed and changed is vital, because these attitudes can govern the decisions that world leaders make.”

Greenwald, a professor at Ohio State from 1965 to 1986, and Banaji, now a social ethics professor at Harvard University, both received the award for their work on “implicit bias,” the unconscious negative attitudes people hold about specific social groups. After collaborating at Ohio State, the researchers co-authored a paper that introduced the term to the field of social psychology. Greenwald, who is now an emeritus professor at the University of Washington, then developed a process to measure implicit bias: the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Since its release online in 1998, the IAT has become a critical assessment tool across fields and industries.
 

Banaji has used neuroimaging techniques to verify results of the IAT: for example, visualizing correlations between amygdala activity and levels of bias. Her more recent work has examined the presence of implicit bias in online texts and its emergence in generative artificial intelligence.

“I can tell you that human attitudes and beliefs are clearly embedded in large language models, often emerging from LLMs even more starkly than in humans,” she said in her acceptance speech. 

“Given the rapid and unregulated evolution of AI today, perhaps this BBVA Foundation award will serve to alert the corporate owners of AI to more thoughtfully consider a technology powerful enough to determine the future of life on earth.”
 

In 2016, Banaji also received the Department of Psychology’s Distinguished Alumni Award for her accomplishments in the field.

As a philanthropic arm of the BBVA Group, a Spanish financial services company, the BBVA Foundation seeks to support scientific research and cultural creation, share knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation. Outside of the social sciences, this year’s Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognized achievements in biology and biomedicine, information and communication technologies, climate change and environmental sciences, and music and opera, among other areas. 

Duane Wegener, chair of the Ohio State Department of Psychology, said he was thrilled to see the department so well represented. 

“The BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award is all about the foundational science upon which future generations of work can be built,” he said. “It is gratifying to see our department so well represented, as that foundational science forms the core of what we do.”