The UCLA Race, Ethnicity, Politics, & Society (REPS) Lab undertakes systematic research into the effects of demographic diversity—racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, political, and ideological—on U.S. society and beyond. While many of our lab’s affiliates are deeply engaged in better grasping the implications of racial/ethnic diversity for American politics, our group encompasses a wide variety of theoretical questions that are all informed by the latest psychological insights and tested with rigorous and clearly interpretable surveys and experiments.

Launched in fall 2018, the REPS Lab reflects the vision of its founder and director, Efrén Pérez: a political psychologist and award-winning author of books and articles on many of the topics studied by the REPS Lab, including group identity and politics, language and public opinion, and experimental design and analysis.

The REPS Lab strives to generate research that is broadly inclusive of intellectual interests. To this end, we operate on the basis of three basic principles: 1) serving as a research incubator by hosting a weekly working group for (under)graduate students interested in experimental work; 2) performing as a data-collection platform for political science faculty and students conducting experiments; and 3) awarding competitive grants that support faculty and students running their own experiments.