SOCIAL PERCEPTION LAB

(revised 1-30-07)
We call ourselves The Social Perception Lab (SPL) because nearly all of our research addresses how people think about, understand, judge, evaluate, and perceive other people. FOR A SUMMARY OF WORK COMPLETED IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, GO TO MY BIO PAGE (The second half of my bio focuses largely on research conducted in the last few years).

FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT WORK CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS,
GO TO MY WORK IN PROGRESS PAGE PAGE

The SPL is located in room 301 Tillett Hall on Livingston Campus. 

PH.D.'s
Stacy Robustelli, 2006.  Interests: Motivation and academic achievement, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Robin Freyberg, 2005 (primary advisor, Jeannette Haviland).  Interests:
Social development.  Currently working on factor and mediation analyses involving
the PC scale and Kent Harber's Social Support Opinion Survey (see Kathleen Kennedy, below).
Polly Palumbo, 2003.
Alison Smith, 2000, Market Researcher at Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas, Inc. (NY)
Celina Chatman, 1999, Associate Director, Center for Human Potential Public Policy, University of Chicago
Stephanie Madon, 1998, Currently an assistant professor at Iowa State U.
Kathy Aboufadel, 1995, Senior Project Manager, Spectrum Health, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Rebecca Yen, 1993, Associate Professor w/tenure at the Yuan-Ze Institute of Technology, Taiwan.
Laura Pople, 1993, Psychology Editor, Worth Publishers.

CURRENT GRAD STUDENTS
Tom Cain.  Interests: Stereotypes and person perception.  Currently working
on his masters thesis which will examine the role of stereotypes and
individuating information in implicit perceptions of individual targets.
Florette Cohen.  Interests: Our local champion of Terror Management Theory; also,
anti-Semitism.
Jarret Crawford.  Interests: Stereotypes, prejudice, and political attitudes.  Currently
advising Chris Schierle's and James Delaguila's honors theses (see below).
Also, former grad and current postdoc, Stacy Robustelli.

CURRENT AND RECENT HONORS STUDENTS
Laura Ragusa (2007, expected).
Thesis: Stereotype Accuracy Regarding Incarceration.
Laura is examining the (in)accuracy of people's beliefs about
the incarceration rates of various different demographic groups
(African-Americans, Whites, Latinos, Men, Women, mentally ill).

Christoph Schierle (2006).
Thesis: Measuring Brain Activity While Lying to Appear Unprejudiced: An ERP Study
Chris is performing the first social cognitive neuroscience study associated with
my lab.  ERP's are Event Related Potentials, which are pattens of electrical activity
in the brain.  Lying has been demonstrated to evoke a unique pattern of ERP's.
In this study, people's ERP responses to the PC scale (see Romain Walker, below)
were found to be similar to those occurring when telling blatant lies
(e.g., it is 90 degrees outside today -- when "today" is a typical December day in New Jersey).
Currently being prepared for journal submission.

Gautam Bhasin (2006).
Thesis: Mortality Salience and Anti-Semitism.
According to Terror Management Theory (TMT), people cope with the
knowledge of the inevitability of their own deaths by attempting to
create a worldview in which they can somehow become immortal.
This is most obvious in most religions, which either have some sort
of afterlife or reincarnation.  It is also present, however, in more
secular endeavors, such as science, writing, art, and even having
a family, all of which are ways that one can endure in some sense
beyond one's physical death.  Because these are all ways to
cope with the inevitability of death, when death is made salient,
people cope by re-affirming the most important aspects of their
cultural worldview and values.  Jews, by virtue of their extraordinary
success in almost any culture that has given them the same freedoms
afforded to non-Jews, and by virtue of holding to a very different
worldview than nearly everyone else on the planet, inherently
threaten many people's worldviews.  Therefore, when death
is made salient, many people may be particularly likely to
become more hostile to Jews, if given the opportunity.
Gautam's study tested these ideas, and found that
under mortality salience, people:
1. became more hostile to Jews.
2. became more hostile to Israel.
3. viewed Israel as looming large (an effect occurring with no
other country).
4. increased their willingness to punish Israel for human rights
violations more than they increased their willingness to punish
other countries (India, Russia) for the identical violation.
Currently being prepared for journal submission.

James Delaguila (2006). 
Thesis: Political perception.  Ideology (liberal/conservative)
biases people's interpretations of news articles purporting to
oppose racial profiling or support the war in Iraq.


Reshma Stafford (2005, currently preparing her application
to graduate programs in clinical psychology)
Thesis: Bending Over Backwards: When White’s Threatened
Egalitarianism Causes Excessive Leniency towards African Americans. 
Reshma performed an experiment examining hypothesis about why
Whites often are more lenient (favorable) in their evaluations of
the work of African Americans than in their evaluations of work
of Whites.  (Lots of folks may find the mere existence of this
basic pattern surprising, but see Harber, 1998, Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology for some of the earlier evidence).  Her
hypothesis was that Whites do so because they are motivated
to prove that they are egalitarian and not racists.  To test this,
she either threatened Whites' egalitarianism or affirmed it.
Exactly as predicted, Whites were most lenient when their
egalitarianism was threatened (because they then really had to prove
how non-racist they were); and they were no more lenient when
evaluating African Americans than when evaluating Whites
when their egalitarianism had been affirmed (because they no
longer needed to prove they were not racists).
This has become part of a paper that is currently under editorial review
for publication.

Kathleen Kennedy (2005, currently attending Princeton's graduate
program in social psychology)
Thesis:  SOCIAL SUPPORT OPINION SURVEY (SSOS) VALIDATION STUDY
Katie performed two studies validating a new questionnaire, the Social Support Opinion Survey.
 Two validation studies examined the relationships of people’s support styles to their personality, world view,
gender, and the amount and type of support that they receive themselves. These studies
found significant correlations between both the SSOS Direct and Nondirect subscales
and several measures of personality, received support, and world views.  In addition,
both men and women were more likely to provide nondirect than direct support, but women
were more likely than men to provide nondirect and less likely than men to provide direct support. 
These findings support the validity of the SSOS as a measure of individuals’ support giving style. 
This has become part of a paper that is currently under editorial review
for publication.

Sachelle Heavens (2005, currently attending CUNY's graduate
program in social psychology)
Thesis: The Political Correctness (PC) Scale: Measuring Lying to Appear Unprejudiced.
Sachelle performed a combined experimental and correlational study
testing the validity of the PC scale.  And found that the scale
correlated beautifully with prejudice (higher pc, lower prejudice
against African-Americans, Asians, and women); it correlated
beautifully with three measures of lying to make one appear
better than one really is; and it was highly responsive to
situational pressures to appear unprejudiced.
She is currently spending another year at Rutgers,
taking courses and preparing for graduate school.

Romain Walker (2002, currently applying to law schools)
Thesis: Politically Correct Responding.
Romain's honors thesis involves two experimental studies
assessing the validity of the PC Scale.  Romain's thesis
received an award for being one of the top psychology
theses of 2002, and a slightly revised version was published in
The Rutgers Scholar, volume 4.  Click here to read this paper.


 

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