Few academic journeys are like that of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) professor, Dr. Jimmy Calanchini. A proud product of the UC System, Calachini’s journey to become a social psychologist winds through time. Traversing the path of an engineering student, playing for a rock band and finally having a distinguished career in psychology with international postdoctoral work and groundbreaking research on bias, identity and social cognition to boot.
The Bakersfield native began his undergraduate studies at UC Davis as a civil engineering major, but he quickly realized that it was not where his interests lay. After two years, he took two quarters off to reflect on what he wanted to do, and what he cared about.
While living at home and working at a record shop to pay the bills, he attended a concert put on by American punk rock band the Ramones, which turned out to be a transformative experience. Dr. Calanchini found himself endlessly reflecting not just on the music, but on the people. He wondered about individuals in the crowds and the social interactions unfolding around him at the concert. His curiosity led him to audit a psychology course at Cal State Bakersfield, and it was there when everything clicked.
“I realized I loved thinking about people,” Dr. Calanchini recalled. “I loved thinking in this way and this way to understand the world.”
The following winter, he returned to UC Davis, completely infatuated with psychology. After working in a memory lab and a personality lab, Calanchini found partiality in graduate seminars. Unlike lecture-based courses, graduate seminars were collaborative and discussion driven. “You’re expected to contribute.” Dr. Calanchini remembers, “this is grad school? Sign me up.”
But life went in a different direction.
After graduating, he originally planned to take one year off before applying to graduate school. But while working at a record store, he joined a band, recorded music and distributed it. Dr. Calanchini got accepted to doctoral programs, but he faced an unexpected decision. “I got into grad school, but I also landed a record deal.”
Dr. Calanchini chose music. “I knew if I didn’t take the record deal, I’d always regret it,” he expressed. “I figured, if I could get into grad school once, I could probably get in again. But I would never get a record deal again.”
Over the next decade, Dr. Calanchini toured across the U.S. and Europe with his band promoting their record label, Downtown Academy. “Music has always been central to my identity,” he stated. “That decade was the right thing for me.”
These years proved useful in shaping his academic interests. “The punk scene is very politically charged, with race, class and identity,” he explained. “It’s also a space where extremist groups try to recruit.” While encountering people in this demographic over the years, Dr. Calanchini developed an almost automatic ability to recognize threats. “You just know where the trouble is going to be … It’s pattern recognition. It becomes automatic.”
The experience became influential to his research. “From a social psychological perspective, it’s fascinating,” he explained. “How do automatic impulsive processes contribute to judgments?”
His questions led him to return to academia, where he earned his doctoral degree at UC Davis and completed his postdoc at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany. His journey then brought him to UCR as a faculty member running the Riverside Social and Spatial Cognition Lab, studying how attention, memory, perception and cognitive control shape social judgements, specifically when it comes to gender, race, class and gender identity. His work is mathematical, utilizing global datasets with millions of participants.
Some of his lab’s findings are that regions with higher levels of racial bias tend to show higher rates of police violence against Black Americans, and countries that strongly endorse traditional gender stereotypes have fewer women in leadership roles. These discoveries show how psychology research can have large-scale societal implications.
While Dr. Calanchini identifies primarily as a basic scientist, his work is becoming more interdisciplinary. Working alongside his graduate students, some of which participate in UCR’s Science to Policy Program, his lab is turning empirical findings into policy-relevant insights. One current project aims to inform United Nations initiatives by linking global gender stereotypes to women’s well-being across nations.
Looking ahead, Dr. Calanchini hopes to be a mentor to his students and those curious to join his research lab. “I don’t see undergrads just as helpers,” he insisted, “That doesn’t honor the training mission of the University of California.” His lab emphasizes training and collaboration, where undergraduate researchers meet with graduate students, participate in lab meetings, present their work and have the opportunity to showcase their research at campus conferences. “Watching an undergrad give their first research talk — that’s one of the most rewarding parts of my job.”
In an age when students are often pressured to have everything figured out early, Dr. Calanchini sees the nontraditional path as a strength. “You don’t have to have a perfect path,” he noted. “That decade outside academia gave me a perspective nobody else has. People who need to take time off of school because of familial, cultural, personal obligations, have the life experience to ask unique [research] questions no one else is asking.”
