Cynthia Wang is the Executive Director of the Dispute Resolution and Research Center (DRRC) and a Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and a M.S. and Ph.D in Management and Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Professor Wang has taught classes in negotiations, organizational behavior, group decision-making, and cross-cultural communications at the undergraduate, MBA, and executive levels. She currently teaches Negotiation Fundamentals and Advanced Negotiations at Kellogg. Her research interests fall in the area of cultural and social diversity, political polarization, and negotiations. An ongoing line of her research examines how to reduce social bias. She has examined how perspective-taking (i.e., actively imagining the world from another’s viewpoint) reduces prejudice, encourages the coordination of social behavior, and bolsters social bonds in diverse settings. Complimenting her interest in perspective-taking as a means to reduce bias, she has also demonstrated how stigmatized groups can reduce the social biases that they experience. She explores how individuals employ social creativity to diminish the pernicious impact of stigmatizing labels by self-labeling (self-consciously referring to oneself in terms of a stigmatizing label). She publishes in top research outlets such as Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organization Science, and Psychological Science, and has received attention from media outlets such as Time Magazine, Scientific American, New York Times, and BBC. She has received a number of research and teaching awards, including a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship and several best paper awards at the Academy of Management Conference.
She is an active member in the international academic community. She is currently President of the International Association for Conflict Management and served as a program chair of and board representative for this association. Prior to her academic life, she worked at Imagitas Corporation (a subsidiary of Red Ventures) in a role managing and consulting for public and private sector organizations.
