Rate My Professor Micheal Zarate

Dr. Michael A. Zárate is a Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. He earned a B.A. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983, followed by an M.S. in Psychology in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1990, both from Purdue University. His research examines the social cognitive processes that underlie person and group perception and how those processes contribute to prejudice and stereotyping. Key lines of inquiry include how time and sleep affect social perception processes through memory consolidation, the development of a cultural inertia model explaining group resistance to change and resulting prejudice, and the influence of cultural factors on self-perceptions and group perceptions.

Dr. Zárate has held his faculty position at UTEP since completing his doctorate and currently serves as Associate Dean. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, both awarded in 2012, and received the UTEP Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award in 2004. His publications include chapters and articles such as “Cultural inertia, identity, and intergroup dynamics in a changing context” (2019) in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, “Guilty by association: Time-dependent memory consolidation facilitates the generalization of negative – but not positive – person memories to group and self judgments” (2019) in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and multiple works on acculturation, cultural change, and intergroup relations. Dr. Zárate integrates student involvement across all levels of his research program.