Jeremy E. Sawyer
Social & Developmental Psychologist
I study how socially organized activities can become leading forces in human development and transformation. My research spans developmental and social psychology, from children’s play and private speech to adults’ participation in collective action and their encounters with social movements. Across these areas, I ask how shared activity can transform how we think, relate to one another, understand ourselves and society, and become capable of changing the world — and ourselves in the process.
My current research focuses especially on how social and labor movements shape intergroup attitudes, political solidarity, class consciousness, activist identity, and psychological development.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
Doctoral Faculty
CUNY Graduate Center
Research Areas
Social Movements & Psychological Change
How mass social movements – and direct or indirect encounters with collective action – can change attitudes, implicit and explicit biases, political attention, solidarity, and consciousness.
Activist Organizing, Solidarity & Intergroup Relations
How organizing transforms activists themselves by fostering intergroup contact and political solidarity, developing activist identities, and generating other forms of psychological change.
Social Class, Work & Labor Struggle
How work alienation and class exploitation can propel class consciousness, solidarity, labor struggle, and collective action, while developing Marxist approaches to understanding and measuring social class.
Development, Play & Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
How children develop motivation and perspective taking through leading activities like sociodramatic play and processes such as private speech, and how Vygotskian and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) inform my broader research program.
Current Projects
Teacher Strikes & Psychological Change
How major U.S. teacher strikes alter racial attitudes, class consciousness, and public attention to social justice – and when labor struggles become transformative moments of psychological and political change.
Activists on Psychological Transformation
A qualitative interview project examining how sustained participation in organizing changes activists’ identities, relationships, emotions, political understanding, and sense of what is possible.
Intergroup Contact & Solidarity among Activists
How collaboration among activists from different racial and ethnic groups can reduce intergroup biases while fostering political solidarity and continued collective action.
SPARC Lab
The Social-Developmental Psychology and Activism Research Collective (SPARC Lab) brings together undergraduate and graduate students across CUNY to study activism, social movements, intergroup bias, political solidarity, and psychological transformation through collective action. Our work emphasizes collaborative research, student mentoring, and the development of projects from study design and data collection through analysis, conference presentation, and publication.
Selected Publications
Gravelle, D., Brooks, P. J., & Sawyer, J. E. (2025).
Disentangling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests on implicit anti-Black bias.
Acta Psychologica.
Gravelle, C. D., Sawyer, J. E., Rualo, G., & Brooks, P. J. (2024).
A critical activist orientation predicts lower latent ableist bias.
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 24, 1032–1056.
Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2023).
Social movements as parsimonious explanations for implicit and explicit attitude change.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 27(1), 28–51.
Gampa, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2023).
Transforming neoliberal social psychology into an emancipatory science: A call to abolish the police.
Annual Review of Critical Psychology.
Sawyer, J. E. (2023).
Can private speech and sociodramatic play promote perspective taking and reduce egocentrism? A Post-Vygotskian reply to Piaget.
American Journal of Play, 15(3), 254–280.
Sawyer, J. E., & Brooks, P. J. (2021).
Sociodramatic play enhances preschoolers’ private speech and motivation across activities.
Cognitive Development, 59.
Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2020).
Work alienation and its gravediggers: Social class, class consciousness, and activism.
Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(1), 198–219.
Sawyer, J. E., & Goldstein, T. (2019).
Can guided play and storybook reading promote children’s drawing development?
Empirical Studies of the Arts, 37(1), 32–59.
Sawyer, J. E., & Gampa, A. (2018).
Implicit and explicit racial attitudes changed during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(7), 1039–1059.
Sawyer, J. E., & Stetsenko, A. (2018).
Revisiting Marx and problematizing Vygotsky: A transformative approach to language and speech internalization.
Language Sciences, 70, 143–154.
Connect
For research collaborations, student inquiries, speaking invitations, or questions about SPARC, feel free to get in touch.