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Current Plant Lab Graduate Students
My research explores questions related to prejudice, intergroup relations, and politics. Broadly, I am interested in how basic group processes and intergroup attitudes operate in our increasingly tribal sociopolitical climate. For example, some of my recent work finds that partisans are particularly motivated to engage in political aggression when they believe that doing so will help them gain the favor of fellow ingroup members. I am also interested in the automatic and controlled processes involved in the expression of prejudice and intergroup hostility, particularly when people perceive relaxed normative restrictions on such expressions. In addition to intergroup hostility, I am interested in the psychological and moral differences between liberals and conservatives and their implications for political persuasion.
One of the challenges of contemporary racism is that it is associated with more abstract and “hidden” problems, such as systemic inequality, which makes it harder to identify and address. How do we fight something that relies on willful ignorance and plausible deniability? First, we need to unmask all the factors that constitute contemporary racism. Second, we need to identify the kind of people who are more susceptible to contemporary racism. Thus, my work focuses on understanding how individual difference factors (motivations, mindsets) relate to modern-day racism.
One primary focus of my current research is studying what factors impact and contribute to individuals’ beliefs about the changeability or malleability of prejudice and the outcomes that stem from those beliefs. While this research has primarily been focused on race, I would like to examine these constructs involving sexuality as well. Another area of research I’m exploring is the idea of contagion concerns involving sexuality. Past research has suggested that there are factors beyond just prejudice that negatively impact majority group members interactions with LGBTQ+ individuals, such as the concern of being perceived as gay, and I would like to extend this research further.
My current research endeavors the understanding of the ways in which affectivity is an instrument in producing, causing, or being implicated in prejudiced attitudes. Distinctly, I use mechanisms within empathy like empathic motivation, empathic accuracy, and empathic self-efficacy to investigate the intersection between warm, positive emotions (i.e., empathy) and hostile, negative attitudes (i.e., prejudice). In this investigation, I learn more about the intricacies involved in its expression and how it may facilitate how researchers think of emotionality’s role in prejudiced beliefs, and most importantly, figure out ways to reduce it.
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