Area Research Topics
Our research
interests span a diverse range of topics and methodologies, as
can be seen from the individual faculty listings. Areas of particular
strength include:
Aggression & Violence
Aggression
and violence research at Michigan focuses on the cognitive,
cultural, evolutionary, and learning processes that shape
individual differences and situational consistencies in
aggressive and violent behavior. [more]
Attitudes
& Persuasion
Attitudes
and persuasion research at Michigan addresses basic issues of
attitude formation, attitude change, and attitude measurement,
as well as a range of applied issues, ranging from racial
attitudes to attitudes towards the death penalty. [more]
Culture
& Cognition
Work in this
area explores cultural differences in human thought and
behavior. [more]
Decision
Making
Decision
research at Michigan spans several departments and professional
schools and is organized in the Decision Consortium. Topics
range from basic cognitive processes involved in decision making
to expert systems, organizational studies and policy issues. [more]
Emotion
Work in this
area addresses the antecedents and consequences of emotional
experience and emotions' role in human cognition and behavior.
[more]
Evolution
& Psychology
Evolutionary
theorizing plays prominent role in many areas of psychological
research at Michigan, which is home to an interdisciplinary
program in Evolution and Human Adaptation (EHAP). Relevant
topics include the application of evolutionary theorizing to
basic issues of cognition, emotion, and behavior. [more]
Group,
Intergroup, and Interpersonal Processes
Historically, Michigan played a leading role in groups
research, much of which was conducted at the Research Center for
Group Dynamics. Current research in this area focuses on
intergroup relations and group decision making.
[more]
Psychology & Law
At Michigan,
researchers in this area address a broad set of issues related
to jury decision making and attitudes toward capital punishment.
[more]
Social
Identity, Race, & Prejudice
Research in
this area addresses topics like racial and ethnic identity,
stereotyping, social stigma and intergroup relations. [more]
Self
Several
faculty in social psychology and other areas of the psychology
department study self and self-processes, with a special
emphasis on the relation of basic self-processes such as self-
esteem, self-objectification, and social identity to mental
health and achievement-related outcomes. [more]
Social
Cognition
Social
cognition research at Michigan covers the full range of social
cognition topics, from person perception and stereotyping to the
interplay of feeling and thinking, the role of conversational
processes in human judgment, and the interplay of conscious and
nonconscious processes [more]
Aggression & Violence
Aggression
and violence researchers at the University of Michigan study
questions related to the biosocial foundations of human
aggressive and violent behavior. Investigations concern both the
situational determinants of such behavior and the development
throughout the life course of individual differences in the
propensity to behave violently. While the theoretical
orientation of most researchers is social cognitive, these
questions are addressed from a variety of perspectives including
evolutionary theory, cultural differences, learning and
information processing, and mass media effects. Research
approaches range from longitudinal field studies to laboratory
experiments.
Faculty in
Psychology with active interests in Aggression and Violence
include:
Eugene
Burnstein: Burnstein is investigating the causes of
intergroup conflict and aggression. His interests range from the
role of evolved mechanisms and resource competition to deceptive
communications in affecting the risk for aggression and violent
interactions.
Jennifer
Crocker: Crocker is examining the relation between the
contingencies on which people base their self-esteem and the
risk that a threat to self-esteem may provoke aggression.
Rowell
Huesmann: Huesmann has proposed that individuals are
characterized by a system of world schemas, scripts, and
normative beliefs that influence information processing in
social problem solving and contribute to individual differences
in aggressive behavior. With longitudinal field studies that
follow children into adulthood, he is investigating the role of
cultural and the mass media, parents, peers, and predisposing
personal factors in molding these social cognitions. With
laboratory research he is examining the immediate influence of
these cognitions on affective responses to provocation and
observing violence. With preventive intervention studies in the
field, he is examining whether these social cognitions can be
changed resulting in changes in aggression and violence. -- Rowell Huesmann's Profile.
Ethan Kross: Kross's work examines how aggressive impulses and retaliatory behavior can be effectively controlled through various implicit and explicit self-regulatory processes.
Richard
Nisbett: Nisbett is interested in the interaction of culture
and cognition in the decision making that leads to aggressive
and violent behavior. He has proposed that the culture in which
individuals grow up influence their affective and cognitive
reactions to provocations . In particular, Nisbett studies
"cultures of honor" in which violence is considered to
be an appropriate response to an insult.
Daphna
Oyserman: In her early research Oyserman showed how
individual differences in self-concept were related to risk for
delinquency and aggression in adolescents. This has led to more
recent field research investigating the development of self-
concept in high risk environments and how self-concept relates
to socio-emotional outcomes including aggression in such
contexts. Her current research also examines how to intervene in
the schools to prevent negative outcomes such as aggression in
such environments.
Related
research is being conducted as part of the Culture and
Cognition Program and the Aggression Research
Program of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the
Institute for Social Research.
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Attitudes
& Persuasion
Attitudes
and persuasion researchers at the University of Michigan address
questions of attitude formation, attitude change, attitude
structure, attitude measurement, and how attitudes guide
behavior. Many of these questions are examined with topics
having applied and practical significance, such as racial
attitudes, political attitudes, attitudes towards the death
penalty, and the effects of media on aggression and stereotypes.
In addition to the social psychology program, attitude research
is conducted at the Survey Research Center, the Center for
Political Studies, The University of Michigan Business School,
and the departments of sociology, political science, and
communication, providing a rich interdisciplinary environment
for research in this field.
Social
psychology faculty with research interests in attitudes and
persuasion include:
Phoebe
Ellsworth: Ellsworth investigates attitudes toward the death
penalty and explores the societal developments underlying their
change over time.
Rowell
Huesmann: Huesmann focuses on the role that beliefs and
attitudes play in controlling aggression and social conflict. He
is investigating both cross-cultural differences in attitudes
and beliefs related to the approval of interpersonal aggressive
behavior and in the development in childhood and adolescence of
individual differences in normative beliefs about the
appropriateness of aggression. His information processing theory
emphasizes prominent roles for early environment and the mass
media in shaping such beliefs. ---[Rowell Huesmann's Profile] ---
Norbert
Schwarz: Schwarz conceptualizes attitudes as a judgment
problem and investigates how people construct attitude judgments
on the spot, giving rise to pronounced context effects. His work
illustrates that construal models can account for stability as
well as change in attitude judgments without assuming that
people hold enduring attitudes.
Oscar
Ybarra: Ybarra investigates attitudes towards social groups,
such as Whites' attitudes towards Blacks and vice versa and
people's attitudes toward immigrant groups. Much of this
research is guided by the integrated threat theory, which is
based on the idea that when evaluating social groups, people
take into account the varied types of threats (realistic,
symbolic, and interpersonal) that such groups pose.
The
University of Michigan also has an extensive network of programs
examining attitudes and persuasion, including the Survey Research Center,
the National Election
Study , the Inter-
University Consortium for Political and Social Research
(ICPSR), the Center for
Political Studies, the Interdepartmental
Program in Mass Communication, and the Yaffee Center for
Persuasive Communication, providing a rich interdisciplinary
environment for research in this field.
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Emotion
The Social
Psychology Area includes a vibrant focus on human emotions. It
serves as a hub that has sponsored a regular Emotion Lab meeting
that draws students and faculty from across the Department and
University. Among the overarching goals of those who study
emotions at the University of Michigan is an effort to
understand the evolutionary design and functions of emotions,
the social and cognitive causes and consequences of emotions,
and the extent to which emotional processes vary by culture.
Faculty
within the Social Psychology Area who study emotions include:
Phoebe
Ellsworth: Ellsworth has made substantial contributions to
the research literature on emotions with her work on cognitive
appraisals. Cognitive appraisals are the subjective
interpretations of events that most directly determine which
emotions people experience. More recently, Ellsworth has
contributed to our field’s understanding of cultural
variations within emotion processes. She argues that cultural
differences in appraisals can account for cultural differences
in experienced emotions.
Ethan Kross: Kross's main line of research examines how different emotions (anger, sadness, worry, anxiety) can be adaptively controlled and the role that psychological distance plays in this process. He adopts an integrative approach to investigating these issues, utilizing methods and measures from multiple levels of analysis (behavioral, social-cognitive, cognitive-neuroscience, health) to shed light on this issue. [Ethan Kross's Lab Page: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ekross/].
Randolph
Nesse: Nesse has made significant contributions to our
field’s theoretical understandings of the adaptive value
of negative emotions. His classic paper “What good is
feeling bad?” charts the evolutionary origins and
significance of several negative emotions. His current work
centers on the evolutionary significance of depression, or low
mood. He argues that low mood prompts disengagement from
unsuccessful goal pursuits.
Norbert
Schwarz: Schwarz investigates the influence of moods and
emotions on human judgment, reasoning, and decision making. His
influential mood-as-information model conceptualizes how people
use their feelings as a source of information in judgment and
decision making. His work also shows that being in a positive
mood fosters a heuristic reasoning style, whereas being in a
negative mood fosters a systematic reasoning style. His current
research in this area extends this work to the informational
functions of bodily sensations and other phenomenal
experiences.
Faculty in
other areas of the Department and across the University also
study emotions and have close ties to students and faculty in
the Social Psychology Area. These include Susan Nolen-Hoeksema
in the Personality Area, Kent Berridge in the Biopsychology Area,
Namdi Pole in the Clinical Area, Brenda Volling in the Developmental
Psychology Area, Arnold Samoroff and Ann Shields in the Developmental-Psychopathology Program, and Stephan Taylor and Israel Liberzon
in Psychiatry.
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Evolution
& Psychology
At the
University of Michigan evolutionary psychology is not an
isolated division, but a perspective that informs broadly much
research and thinking in many areas of psychology. This said,
the consideration of evolutionary explanations for psychological
traits requires special methods, especially comparisons between
species and between groups, and careful observations of
whether behavior regulation mechanisms match
predictions made from evolutionary hypotheses. The University of
Michigan has a long-standing reputation for expertise in this
area, arising initially from the University's Evolution and
Human Adaptation program that initiated much work
in the field
during the late 1980s and led to the founding of the Human Behavior and Evolution
Society here in 1989. The Evolution and Human
Adaptation Program continues the across campus initiative
with a weekly lecture series that brings together faculty and
students from Anthropology, Biology, Psychology, Philosophy,
Sociology, Medicine, Natural Resources, Complex
Systems, Culture and Cognition, and many other Departments and
Programs. While the EHAP does not offer a degree, students who
are affiliated with the program are able to get advice from
faculty conducting evolutionary work similar to their own and
can find a community of like-minded and critical minded scholars
and researchers. Michigan is the only university to have
such a wide-ranging interdisciplinary effort to bring
evolutionary principles to bear on the problems of social
science, philosophy, and medicine.
In
Psychology, an evolutionary perspective is particularly valued,
as evidenced by the large number of faculty investigating
evolutionary questions. A core group of faculty are
investigating how natural selection shaped the emotions.
In the
Social Psychology Area, Phoebe Ellsworth studies the interface
between cognition and emotion. Randolph Nesse investigates
the situations in which high and low mood are useful and how
they become dysregulated to states of mania and depression.
Norbert Schwarz explores how moods and emotions guide reasoning
about social phenomena. Eugene Burnstein studies kinship and the
special kinds of altruism that arise in kin relationships.
Richard Nisbett explores the evolutionary underpinnings of human
cognition and their interplay with cultural influences. Richard
Gonzalez investigates mathematical models of adaptation in both
decision making and group behavior. Oscar Ybarra: Ybarra studies
how people's self-representations are altered toward
unpredictability during competitive interactions, social
vigilance in person perception, and disclosure in intimate
relationships.
In Bio-
Psychology Kent Berridge investigates the functions of brain
systems that regulate attention, motivation and pleasure. Susan
Nolen-Hoeksema in Personality Psychology studies the role of
rumination and its relationship to depression and women's roles.
Barbara Smuts is an expert on relationships among
primates and in dog behavior. Warren Holmes studies cues that
allow ground squirrels to recognize kin and how those cues
influence behavior. While these are some of the faculty most
involved in evolutionary
studies, many more could be listed.
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Group,
Intergroup, and Interpersonal Processes
Michigan
social psychologists have made some of the most important
contributions to the understanding of how groups affect
individuals. This includes the pioneering experimental and field
studies by Festinger, Kelley, Schachter, and Back on cohesion,
communication, and conformity in groups followed by classic
analyses of social networks and social power; group structure
and group performance, social facilitation, and family size,
birth-order, and intellectual development. Many of these
interests continue to the present along with more recent
programs of research on the polarization of attitudes in groups,
group decision making, bargaining and negotiation, group
identity and intergroup relations, and the evolutionary analysis
of interpersonal relations and group life. The faculty working
in these areas have appointments in the Research Center for Group
Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research as well as the
Department of Psychology. In addition they along with interested
students typically participate in a variety of research groups
such as the Decision Making Consortium, the Evolution and Human
Adaptation Program, the Group
Dynamics Seminar, the Culture and
Cognition Lab, the Complex Systems Program,
the International Workshop on Race and Ethnic Relations, and the
Warsaw University
summer seminars on adaptation to post-communism.
Social
psychology faculty with active research in this area include:
Eugene
Burnstein: Burnstein's research is concerned with the
psychological adaptations that evolved to deal with the problems
of living in groups. It considers a broad range of problems such
as those associated with resource acquisition (e.g., collective
and individual foraging strategies), resource sharing (e.g.,
altruism, reciprocity, and cooperation), deceptive communication
(e.g., cheating, “false advertising”, and their
detection), and intergroup relations (e.g., alliances and
conflict).
Phoebe
Ellsworth: Ellsworth's interest in group processes centers
on jury decision making. For a description see the Psychology
& Law section.
Stephen Garcia: Garcia studies social comparison processes at the interpersonal and intergroup levels to understand and identify factors which precipitate competitive versus cooperative behavior.
Richard
Gonzalez: Gonzalez’s research deals with how groups
make decision and how groups influence individual decision
making. He is also involved in developing and testing complex
systems that permit the modeling of macro-level behavior from
simple micro-level assumptions (e.g., the emergence of
coordinated group behavior from simple assumptions of
interacting individuals).
James
Jackson:Research efforts include carrying out a number of
national surveys and one international survey of black
populations focusing on issues of racial and ethnic influences
on life course development; attitude change; reciprocity; social
support; and coping and health. Jackson is currently co-
investigator of a study taking place at the Detroit Psychiatric
Institute on the effects of race upon misdiagnosis. Teaching
centers on social factors in health, race and racism, and
sources of misdiagnosis in black populations
Denise
Sekaquaptewa: Sekaquaptewa studies the role of stereotypes
in intergroup relations. For a description see the Social
Cognition section.
Oscar
Ybarra: Ybarra investigates stereotyping processes and
biases that occur in intergroup perception such as misanthropic
memory and the belief that outgroup stereotypes are less open to
disconfirmation relative to the ingroup stereotype. Ybarra is
also interested in conflict resolution, in particular the manner
in which people judge the severity of conflict in intergroup and
intragroup situations.
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Psychology & Law
Psychology
& Law researchers at the University of Michigan study
questions related to jury decision making, eyewitness testimony,
legal and extra-legal influences on verdicts, and attitudes
towards the death penalty. Faculty and student research has
employed a wide range of methods, including laboratory
experiments, field studies, simulations, surveys, and archival
analyses. The University of Michigan Law School, one of the top
ten law schools in the country, has several faculty who teach
courses and conduct research on topics related to Psychology
& Law.
Faculty in
the Social and Cognitive Psychology Area with active research
programs in Psychology & Law include:
Phoebe
Ellsworth: Ellsworth studies jury decision making, including
1) jurors' competence to perform different aspects of their task
(e.g., finding facts, assessing witness credibility, applying
law) and ways to improve their performance, and 2) the effects
of the composition of the jury (racial, attitudinal) on decision
making. She is also an expert on capital punishment and the
psychology of attitudes about the death penalty.
Stephen Garcia: Garcia uses the lens of social comparison theory to understand conflict resolution, including defendants' willingness to accept plea bargains and disputants' willingness to accept winner-take-all solutions. Garcia is also interested in leveraging the psychological perspective to help inform legal issues related to competition in the marketplace.
Richard
Gonzalez: Gonzalez’s interest in psychology and law
deals with eyewitness identification decisions (e.g., modeling
how a witness selects someone from a police lineup). He also has
interests in jury decision making.
Colleen
Seifert: Seiffert's work in this area addresses the role of
memory in jury reasoning. Case presentation results in a great
deal of information in memory, from many sources and with
varying degrees of certainty and relevance. How do jurors, or
reasoners more generally, attribute and correct information in
memory based on knowledge or inferences about its current
status? Using laboratory studies, the influence of information
on later judgments can be determined. Other work examines
information status in memory with cognitive measures of
interference to identify "guilty knowledge." Ongoing
research extends the paradigm to witness memory and forensic
investigation.
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Self
In
Michigan's Social Psychology Area, research on the self focuses
on basic processes in self-concept and self-esteem, and the
relationship of social identities to coping, achievement, and
psychological well-being.
Jennifer
Crocker: Crocker's research focuses on contingencies of self-
worth, and their implications for self-regulation and well-
being. Her current research explores the relation between
contingencies of self-worth and self-validation goals, and the
costs of contingencies of self-worth for learning, autonomy,
relationships, self-regulation, and mental and physical
health.
Marita
Inglehart: Inglehart's research focuses on stress and
coping, in particular in a health context. A central concern in
her research is to gain a better understanding of the role of
cultural factors in the health and coping context. In related
work, she applies social psychological theorizing to issues of
health care and the education of health care providers.
Ethan Kross: Kross is interested in understanding the psychological and neural processes that distinguish adaptive and maladaptive forms of self-reflection and the role that perspective-taking in the form of psychological distance plays in determining which of these two forms of self-reflection people engage in. He examines this issue using a variety of methodologies and samples (e.g., young adults, children, clinical samples, older adults). [Ethan Kross's Lab Page: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ekross/]
Daphna
Oyserman: One line of Oyserman's research focuses on
adolescent development in high-risk contexts, with a special
interest in the motivational impact of self-concept and social
identity, and their influences on academic and socio-emotional
outcomes, including mental health. Another line of research
addresses cultural influences on how the self and others are
defined, and the cognitive and motivational consequences of
these differences. Current funded research includes a school-
based preventive intervention based on her research on self and
identity.
In addition,
several faculty in other areas of psychology (such as Susan
Nolen-Hoeksema and Robert Sellers in personality, and Jacque
Eccles in developmental psychology) do research on self
processes, providing a rich environment for the study of the
self.
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Social
Cognition
The Social
Psychology Area includes an active group of faculty and students
interested in social cognition. Many of them participate in a
weekly Social Cognition Lab meeting. Social cognition research
addresses the cognitive factors underlying social perception and
judgment and the mental processes involved in interpersonal and
intergroup interaction.
Stephen Garcia: Garcia is interested in decision making and the psychology of competition. To explore these types of questions, Garcia uses an array of decision-making paradigms such as ultimatum games, resource dilemmas, and the willingness to enter joint ventures.
Richard
Gonzalez: Gonzalez' research focuses on decision making. One
line of work investigates the influence of task information and
information extracted from the behavior of others in complex
decisions, e.g. decisions about one's stock-market portfolio.
Other research examines individual differences in heuristic
reasoning processes, judgment as a function of giving advice
versus rendering personal judgments, and the psychological
grounding of the probability weighting function.
James
Hilton: Hilton pursues research relevant to the relation
between implicit attitudes and behavior. This research has
shown, for example, that implicit attitudes, such as those
assessed by the IAT, reflect environmental associations rather
than object-related likes and dislikes. For this reason,
implicit attitudes may be poor guides for overt behavior. Hilton
also investigates the influence of interaction goals on social
information processing, the role of suspicion in person
perception, and the manner in which stereotypes of social groups
may function as theories that people use to make sense of group-
relevant information.
Rowell
Huesmann: Huesmann is interested in social-cognitive models
of social problem solving that account for individual
differences in aggressive and prosocial behavior and in
situational effects on such behavior. He has developed an
information processing model that emphasizes the steps of cue
evaluation based on world schemas, script generation, and script
evaluation based on normative beliefs. He is conducting studies
to investigate the processes through which the relevant schemas,
scripts, and beliefs are formed in childhood and changed in
adulthood. - WEBPAGE
Richard
Nisbett: Nisbett is interested in the influence of culture
on cognition, including causal judgment, counterfactuals, and
dialectic reasoning. His current research explores differences
between East Asian and Western reasoning styles. Other research
interests include the effect of aging on the use of cultural
scripts, the etiology of cultural differences in social
cognition, and the influence of relational schemas on social
preferences, as well as the emergence of biases in reasoning and
decision making.
Daphna
Oyserman: Oyserman's work in social cognition addresses the
influence of chronic and temporary self-construals on cognition,
communication, and behavior. Some of this work explores
individualism and collectivism in experimental and cross-
cultural studies. Other work focuses on the role of
"possible selves" in social behavior and school
performance. Oyserman tests her theories in laboratory and field
experiments as well as large-scale school interventions, testing
the influence of changing self-concepts on school
performance.
Norbert
Schwarz: Schwarz is interested in the contextual and
situated nature of human cognition. One line of work addresses
context effects in social judgment, including how people
construct attitudes on the spot, how conversational norms
influence information processing, and how the answers to public
opinion questions are shaped by the questions asked. Another
line of work explores the interplay of feeling and thinking and
investigates how affective states (like moods and emotions) and
cognitive experiences (like ease or difficulty of recall, or
perceptual fluency) influence reasoning. Additional research
interests include aging and social judgment and the ways in
which people determine if their lives are good or bad, and
getting better or worse.
Denise
Sekaquaptewa: Sekaquaptewa investigates how people explain
events that are consistent and inconsistent with social group
stereotypes and how biases in explanation can be used as
implicit measures of stereotyping to predict behavior in
interactions with members of the outgroup. In another line of
work, she investigates how solo-status, that is, being the sole
representative of one's social category (e.g., gender or ethnic
group), influences cognition and behavior.
Oscar
Ybarra: Much of Ybarra’s research focuses on person
perception and moral judgment. His work documented the existence
of social vigilance tendencies in person perception, which
generally take the form of perceivers quickly judging that
others have immoral characteristics, but being cognitively
skeptical about others who supposedly have moral
characteristics. Ybarra has also applied these principles to
research in cognitive aging as an attempt to understand why
older adults may be at risk of being swindled. His other
research interests include the effect of power on social
cognition, the influence of interaction goals on self-
representation, and the interplay of culture and cognition.
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Social
Identity, Race, & Prejudice
Our research
in these areas includes topics like stereotyping and prejudice,
intergroup perception, intergroup relations, social stigma, solo
status, and ethnic and racial identity. These research programs
involve laboratory studies as well as survey methodology.
General research questions include: How does social context
and/or culture influence social identity? How are people
motivated to be non-prejudiced? What is the influence of
stereotypes on performance? How can we understand the
experiences of members of stereotyped groups?
Social area
researchers in this area include Jennifer Crocker,James Jackson,Daphna Oyserman, Denise Sekaquaptewa,and Oscar Ybarra.
Affiliated
faculty include Margaret
Shih and Jane
Dutton in organizational psychology, Robert
Sellers in personality psychology, and David Williams in socioiology. Related progams
include the Program
for Research on Black Americans, the Center for
Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Women’s Studies
Program.
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