Richeson was raised in a predominantly white middle-class area of Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a businessman and a school principal. She has described herself as an indifferent and underachieving student in her childhood who blossomed after moving to schools with a more diverse student population. She has cited these early experiences as important in developing her interest in identity and interracial interactions.
Richeson became an assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2000. In 2005, she moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she held appointments in the psychology and African-American studies departments and was a faculty fellow of the Institute for Policy Research and the Center on Social Disparities and Health. She joined the faculty at Yale University in 2016, where she is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Communication Lab. In 2006 Richeson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a "genius grant", for her work studying interracial interactions. In April 2015 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Later the same month, she was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, one of only two new black members according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Research
Richeson describes her research as focusing on "the ways in which social group memberships such as race and gender impact the way people think, feel, and behave." Current ongoing projects in her research group include examining cognition and self-regulation during interracial interactions, the effects of racial bias on the mental health status of minorities, the challenges of navigating the dominant culture as a member of a minority group, and the ways in which perceptions of threat interact with race, particularly for young black men. Richeson's research makes use of fMRI neuroimaging studies. Her work in this area has been described as sophisticated and as moving past descriptive uses of imaging to test real hypotheses. Several of her most influential papers describe fMRI-based findings related to increased cognitive control exerted during interracial interactions by white people whose implicit association test results indicate racial bias. Richeson's more recent work on the effects of demographics on political attitudes – in which studies of politically independent white Americans revealed increasingly conservative political attitudes with increasing awareness of declining white population share – has been widely reported in the media as significant for the future of American national politics. Richeson also publishes opinion pieces and commentary in major media outlets on topics related to race.
