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My research addresses the ways in which people process information about their social environment in a relatively automatic fashion, and the influence of that automatic processing on their behavior. These questions reflect the movement of social psychological theory and research over the last 30 years from the widespread assumption that people generate judgments, attitudes, and actions deliberately and intentionally to the possibility that such phenomena in fact routinely occur without people’s full awareness, control, or effort.

My primary research focus is on automatic evaluation. Although researchers have traditionally assumed that people evaluate the stimuli in their environment in an intentional and effortful manner, more recent work in the field demonstrates that people can evaluate the valence (goodness or badness) of a stimulus in as little as 10 milliseconds, even while they are consciously unaware of the stimulus itself. My research in this area examines the degree to which these kinds of evaluations are flexible (i.e., contextually dependent) and consequential (i.e., influential on subtle and overt behavior). One recent topic in the lab concerns the role of automatic evaluations during conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit.

I am also currently conducting two secondary lines of research. The first concerns the effects of automatically activated, complex knowledge structures on perception and behavior. In particular, my colleagues and I have been examining the extent to which ideological knowledge (e.g., American nationalism) might be activated, automatically, by a related cue (e.g., the American flag) and implicitly influence a host of attitudes, judgments, and behavior. The other secondary line of work addresses the automatic activation and operation of goals, and how it compares with deliberate goal activation and operation. This work tests boundary effects of automatic goal pursuit, as well as potential differences between deliberate versus automatic knowledge activation and processing more generally.

Students who are interested in joining the lab for the 2007-2008 academic year should contact the lab manager, Matt Bussard, at meb55@cornell.edu.

Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research (BEDR)

Social_Psychology
Perception, Cognition & Development

Links

• Psychology 380: Social Cognition
  Fall 2007 information
  
  

updated on Monday, Feb 4 2008 @ 6:34pm

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