Established in 2008, the annual prize recognizes excellence in science and the arts, with a focus on people making highly original contributions that achieved widespread impact. Banaji and 19 other winners arrived in the striking Basque city, famous for its Frank Gehry-designed art museum, to find their photos splashed across airport signage and lamppost banners. Honorees were further celebrated with a Wednesday evening gala and an award ceremony on Thursday.
This year’s Award in Social Sciences went to Banaji and four other social psychologists, all based at universities in the U.S., for advancing knowledge about human attitudes. Their collective contributions have revolutionized how attitudes are understood and measured, with impacts that ripple across fields including psychology, sociology, and political science.
“In choosing to recognize the five of us, born in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, in bringing the world’s attention to these ideas and discoveries, you recognize not only us but our intellectual ancestors who surely imagined but did not live to see a thriving science of attitudes became worthy of a recognition such as this,” Banaji said in her acceptance speech.
Banaji was specifically recognized with the University of Washington’s Anthony Greenwald for work that improved the prediction of hidden biases. Their influential Implicit Association Test was introduced on the World Wide Web in 1998, when Banaji was a professor at Yale University.
“The single most decisive event of my early career was meeting and working with Tony Greenwald,” shared Banaji, who moved to Harvard in 2001. “In our early work, we prioritized the development of a method to measure implicit attitudes and beliefs, and it is today the most widely used instrument to study attitudes and beliefs by a simple count of published work.”
Banaji’s speech also touched upon more recent work, with her lab currently pursuing multiple investigations into machine psychology. “I can tell you that human attitudes and beliefs are clearly embedded in large language models, often emerging from LLMs even more starkly than in humans,” she said. “Given the rapid and unregulated evolution of AI today, perhaps this BBVA Foundation Award will serve to alert the corporate owners of AI to more thoughtfully consider a technology powerful enough to determine the future of life on Earth.”
Endowed by the BBVA Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Spanish banking group BBVA, the Frontiers of Knowledge Award comes with an unrestricted 400,000 Euros per each of its eight categories. Now in its 17th year, the prize has honored hundreds of academics and artists. According to the BBVA Foundation, a total of 31 Frontiers laureates have gone on to win a Nobel Prize.
Project has tracked lives, lifestyles, and well-being of cohorts over decades, led to insights, interventions in cardiovascular disease, cancers, nutrition
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