Welcome to my Undergraduate Research web page! The project that I am offering is designed to provide you with experience in doing research in social psychology. This opportunity should be very beneficial if you are planning to do graduate work. My research is focused on the impressions that we form of other people. I received my Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. While I was there I studied with Marilyn Brewer and David Messick, who are both experts in the field of impression formation. You will find information about my research interests below.

Impressions of Ability and Morality

My early work focused on how the impression process varies depending on the type of trait that is inferred. For example, the impression formation process varies depending on whether perceivers are inferring another person's ability or level of morality. If perceivers are interested in knowing how much ability another person has, they tend to put greater weight on that persons's positive, successful behavior (rather than negative, unsuccessful behavior). Thus, it would be more important to know that the person solved a difficult calculus problem than to know that he or she got lost on the freeway in Chicago. In contrast, if perceivers are interested in knowing how moral a person is, they tend to put more weight on that person's negative behaviors. Thus, it would be more important to know if the person stole money from his or her roommate than to know if the person made a donation to charity.

Impressions of Other Peoples' Motives

Recently, I became been interested in how we infer motives in other people. Was your girlfriend intentionally trying to upset you by being late? Was your mother using a certain tone because you ignored her initial requests to come to the table? Did your classmate cheat because he needed a passing grade to stay on the school football team? These kinds of inferences are very important in our everyday lives, yet social psychologists have hardly studied them at all. In my research I am trying to answer questions such as the following:

Do we infer more selfish motives in others than in ourselves?
What kinds of motives do people infer when they see a person behave in an aggressive manner?
What kinds of motives do perceivers infer for sexually harassing behavior?
When people infer different motives for a person's behavior, how does that affect judgments about the person's traits and likeability?

How Can You Participate?

If you would like to participate in the research, I invite you to contact me by e-mail or at 438-7140. Students in my lab usually enroll in PSY 290 for three hours of credit. That means 7-9 hours of work a week. You will begin by reading articles on the topic of social perception. Then we design one or more studies to test our ideas. The studies often involve surveys or videotapes, which we design ourselves. Then you will help to run the studies and enter data in the computer. Depending on your interests, you might conduct the initial statistical analyses and help to interpret the data. At the end of the semester you will write a 10-20 page paper summarizing your experiences. The specific focus of the paper is negotiable and depends on your interests. I will also encourage you to present your project at the Undergraduate Research Symposium, which is held each spring.