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Ken Dion was born in Laconia, New Hampshire, a town with a sizable population of families of French Canadian ancestry. He attended the University of New Hampshire graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in psychology. During their undergraduate years, Ken and his brother Arnold worked their way through university by playing in a band, many times at the fraternity parties of wealthy schools with very privileged students. This experience, combined with growing up in an economically disadvantaged group, lead to the development of a very strong social conscience the effects of which would later be seen in much of his work, which either tried to document injustice or to assist in ameliorating its effects on disadvantaged groups in society.
After his graduation from New Hampshire, Ken spent a year at SUNY Buffalo before transferring to the graduate program in social psychology at the University oi Minnesota. This transfer had a significant effect on Ken's career but had an even more important impact on other aspects of his life. It was there that he met and married his wife, Karen, then a fellow graduate student. Karen and Ken would be life partners in both their personal and professional lives. In 1970, Ken and Karen each received their PhD in psychology and took up jobs at the University of Toronto. There in the Department of Psychology, Ken began a research and teaching career that would span across numerous subareas of social psychology. In the early 1970s, Ken and his students began to study prejudice from the viewpoint of the victim. When asked about this research in an interview in the early 1980s, Ken said: "I worked in the mills in the town I grew up in and it was quite clear that we didn't have the opportunities that other people had. So looking at the phenomena of prejudice from the point of view of the minority was something I was very comfortable with." Departing from traditional research that focused on the perpetrators of discrimination, Dion and his colleagues began to examine the consequences of perceived prejudice and discrimination on the target or victim. This examination of the phenomenology of being a victim of prejudice effectively turned the study of prejudice, at that time, on its head...