Pedro De Abreu is a Ph.D. student in Management & Organizations at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and a Research Affiliate in the Intergroup Relation Lab at Harvard University. 

In the Sidanius Lab, Pedro is primarily interested in how the intrapersonal––e.g., beliefs, self-concept, and attitudes––and the institutional––e.g., social hierarchies, team composition––aspects of intergroups relations interact and help to shape individual as well as group outcomes.

In his first line of research, Pedro and co-author Sa-Kiera Hudson investigate whether whites and ethnic minorities are differentially affected by the salience of their race in situations of organizational power. While the power literature suggests that individuals in situations of power will experience, for instance, increased levels of cognition, motivation, and self-perception, the stereotype threat literature suggests the relatively mirror opposite effects for individuals––when the negative stereotypes associated with the individuals' group(s) are made salient to them. This research explores this conflicting dichotomy by bringing together the power and the social identity literatures, and by examining the decision-making and cognitive downstream consequences of racial salience.

In a related line of work, Pedro examines the relationship between racial salience and perceptions of socioeconomic mobility. This research explores intrapersonal––social identity; race––and broad, institutional––socioeconomic mobility––aspect of hierarchies and power and asks whether the former predicts the later. One central question of this research investigates whether and to what extent being reminded that one has a historically marginalized and societally low-power group membership shape individuals’ perceptions of their potential to advance socioeconomically.

In his third line of research, Pedro investigates the potential backlash effects of norm deviation—by means of nonconforming behavior—of ethnic minority women in organizations. While recent findings in organizational behavior suggest that nonconforming behavior can result in positive inferences of status and competence, extant theory tells us of robust gender and racial differences with reference to agentic and agentic-like expressions of behavior. Notably, the expression of agentic behavior has been shown to be an important factor in backlash against women in positions of power. This is due, for example, to the seeming incongruence between agentic expression––such as dominance––and prescriptively robust gender roles. Building on intergroup and backlash work, this research examines the inferences of observers––subordinates, bosses, third-party––when ethnic minority women exhibit norm-deviating, implicitly agentic, and explicitly nonconformist behavior in organizational settings.