Thanks for your interest in my research! Below I've described a few of the areas my collaborators and I have gotten ourselves into the past few years. If you clicked the "Research" link because you would like to participate in psychology research, you may do so here and here.
Agency and Time
This research looks at how agency shapes the perception of time. When the mind infers that one's action has caused an event, it creates a perceptual illusion in which action and event seem closer in time than they really are. The presence of certain agency cues - such as consistency between one's action and the subsequent event - has been found to enhance this action binding.
Moral Hypocrisy
In a more theoretical line of research, it is argued that under certain circumstances engaging in 'immoral' behavior can spur one to preach against that same behavior, and that preaching against a behavior can, ironically, cause one to engage in that very behavior. In other words, certain circumstances are ripe for what we call self-fulfilling hypocrisy.
Priming and Measurement
This research asks whether the psychological effects of an event depend on how we measure those effects. In some cases, it appears that the same event can have completely opposite effects in two different measurement contexts, effects that persist beyond the act of measurement.
Culture and Cognition
Previous research has shown that people from individualist cultures (e.g., the U.S.) think about the world somewhat differently than those from collectivist cultures (e.g., Japan). Building off of these findings, our experiments examine whether the religious backgrounds of people affect how they reason about evidence.
Implicit Social Cognition and Prejudice
We social animals carry extensive knowledge about the attitudes of others. Our research has looked at what happens when we are subtly reminded of other people - do we then, without our even knowing it, see the world more like they do?
In a separate line of research using a fear conditioning procedure, we found evidence that humans are generally predisposed to fear new members of racial outgroups - a tendency appears to be significantly weaker among those with a history of interracial contact.
In other research, it was found that men who have the most positive automatic associations with women also have the most sexist beliefs. It thus appears that implicit prejudice can be more than just negative associations.
Self-Control
Our research has found that heightened arousal (in this case, due to exercise) focuses attention onto whatever is most salient in a situation - leading to increased aggression when the situation calls for aggression, but decreased aggression when the situation calls for peace.
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