“No research without action, no action without research”

Kurt Lewin

Measuring (Mis)perceptions of Attitudes toward Social Groups

One of my goals in research is to identify individual- and group-level (mis)perceptions and the consequences of those (mis)perceptions. This research draws on the stereotype content model, attribution theory, and ingroup and outgroup perceptions.

Key Findings

  1. When examining how attribution theory moderates stereotype content, I found that beliefs about choice matter. When people thought members of a warm but low-competence group had chosen their group membership, they felt less pity for them. Conversely, when people believed members of groups seen as both cold and incompetent had chosen their membership, they reacted with more disgust and greater social distance.
  2. Perception of the outgroup’s attitude toward a social group predicted support for a related policy over and above personal attitudes or perception of ingroup attitudes. This suggests that even when someone is personally neutral or negative toward the social group, a person’s perception of an outgroup’s attitude predicts how much they support a social policy. This pattern held across 13 policies/social group combinations, both before and after both the 2020 and 2024 election.
  3. Misperceptions of group-level attitudes towards politicized social groups occur in a U.S. political context. There is widespread outgroup perception inaccuracy for both U.S. political parties, suggesting that partisans are bad at estimating their outgroup’s attitudes towards politicized social groups. I found evidence for pluralistic ignorance (a situation in which many group members simultaneously misperceive that the group norm is different than their own) within the Republican Party, but less instances within the Democratic Party.

Education about Pluralistic Ignorance

In collaboration with over a dozen Visual and Performing Arts students and funded by the Charles E. Scheidt Teaching and Resesarch Grant, I developed a high-quality educational video about pluralistic ignorance to be used in as an intervention stimuli, as well as future uses in the classroom.

Key Findings:

  1. Participants who watched the video scored well on a knowledge check and retained information one-week later.
  2. From a user experience perspective, participants thought the video was aesthetically pleasing, high quality, and understandable.

Reducing Consequences of Misperceptions

Following the identification of content and consequences of misperceptions, my research extends to developing interventions that could reduce the negative effects of these misperceptions. I use Kenneth Gergen’s (1973) concept of the enlightenment effect to see how social psychological knowledge can affect subsequent behavior. Much of the early enlightenment effect research has focused on bystander intervention. I have used the above video on pluralistic ignorance as an intervention to see whether this video (in comparison to a control condition) affects people’s willingness to speak out against social injustice. Findings are forthcoming.