Research Interests
My research interests fall within the general area of social
psychology. A central interest is in "illusion and bias," people's
tendency to be deceived and to make suboptimal judgments. Specifically
I study:
- Detecting incompetence. The roles of the illusion of
learning, one's willingness to admit ignorance, and social/conversational
norms in making it so difficult for people to recognize imposters and
con-artists.
- Believing in the Paranormal. The social psychological
factors which lead many people to interpret their unusual experiences
as evidence for paranormal entities or forces. I am developing a scale
to measure people's belief in and experiences with a host of paranormal
phenomena.
- Effects of "fringe therapies." The factors
which influence the perceived and/or actual impact of therapeutic touch
on healing, music on intellectual functioning, and pheromones on mood
and self-esteem.
- Reactions to predicted disasters. The effects of heuristics/inferential errors and media portrayals of disasters on people's preparatory actions and beliefs about the New Madrid earthquake prediction. Once the disaster failed to occur, the effects of cognitive dissonance, belief perseverance and hindsight biases on beliefs about future disasters and about the Tidal Forces theory used to make the prediction.
Web Materials
- Student
exercise: Can you act randomly?
- My
program to generate interactive quizzes on the Web
- One of my current interests involves assessing
beliefs about and experiences with the paranormal. You can take my surveys
if your browser has the Authorware plug-in. Go to the test
page to see if you have it or to download it for free. Then go here
to take the surveys.