Overall
I am fascinated by our social world and how it influences our perceptions of others, the decisions we make, and our interactions with other. Many of my research ideas come from observations in the real world. I owe much of my love for research, and my successful research projects to my advisors at UVA,
Dr. Stacey Sinclair and Dr. Bobbie Spellman, to my advisor (and collaborator) at Rice Dr. Mikki Hebl , to all the wonderful colleagues and collaborators I have worked with in the Sinclair Lab, the Spellman Lab, and the Hebl Lab , and of course to all the wonderful honors students and research assistants that I have worked with over the years.
Subtle Social Environmental Cues
I am intrigued by subtle cues in our environments (e.g., a name below a color, a price, a message on a tshirt), and how these cues can influence our perceptions, our decisions, and even our interpersonal relationships with others.
Names. Fascinated by friends claiming their green walls were not green but rather "quiet kiwi", I, along with my colleagues at Rice University,investigated whether the name of the color of a product (e.g., paint sample, cosmetics) could influence liking of the color and the product. Since colors are vibrant stimuli and people have personal color preferences, it seemed unlikely that the name stamped at the bottom of a color swatch (e.g., Quiet Kiwi) or a lipstick tube (e.g., Precious Pink) could influence consumers' preferences. However, we found that the name really does matter as "fancy" names (e.g., Mocha) positively influenced color and product preference, purchasing behavior, and the perceived value of items more so than generic names (e.g., Brown) (Skorinko, Kemmer, Lane, & Hebl, 2006).
Prices. Intrigued by the observation that tickets to women's sporting events (especially NCAA) cost less than men's tickets, I, along with my colleagues at Rice University,wondered if alterations in relative ticket pricing of women's team tickets could improve consumer's opinions of women's sporting teams. Using NCAA basketball as a model, we found that a disparity in ticket price existed as ticket prices for women's games cost significantly less than men's games. In subsequent studies, we manipulated whether the women's game ticket price was higher, lower, or equal to the men's ticket price, and found that people undervalued the women's team when their ticket price was less than the men's price. But, raising the price of the women's tickets to be higher than the men's tickets increased the value placed on the team, the desire to attend a game, and the enjoyment participants got out of the game (Hebl, Guiliano, King, Knight, Shapiro, Skorinko, & Wig, 2004).
To see an example of how we ran this study, please visit the Ticket Disparity Study Site
Stigmas and Stereotyping
I am also interested in better understanding how different stigmas and stereotypes (e.g., based on race, weight, disability, sexual orientation, etc.) influence our perceptions, our decisions, and even our interpersonal relationships with others. Mainly, my research in this area focuses on understanding how overt stigmas (or visible stigmas) and implicit (or unconscious) stereotypes influence decisions in an attempt to gain insight into techniques that could improve both interpersonal relationships and social justice.
Stereotypes and Criminal Justice. One place that stereotypes could have the most serious consquences is in the courtroom. Intrigued by this and the fact that a prominent stereotype associated with Blacks is that they tend to be criminals, I wondered whether Blacks are considered equally likely to commit all crimes. To investigate this, I assessed which crimes (55 crimes were used) were associated with different groups of people (13 different groups used). We found that certain crimes were associated with different groups of people (e.g., Whites are stereotyped as embezzlers). We also examined whether crime-related stereotypes affected decisions and memories in the courtroom. We found that biases in verdicts and sentencing were evident when the crime matched the stereotype (e.g., a White defendant committing a White crime). Moreover, we found that participants can misremember the defendant's race and that this memory error was in-line with the stereotype of the crime. In other words, a Black embezzler was, at times, incorrectly recalled as being White (Skorinko & Spellman, under review).
Reducing Discrimination in Applied Settings. While I believe it is important to understand the stereotypes and stigmas that exist and how they affect decisions, I also believe it is extremely important to study practical ways of reducing biases against stigmatized individuals in everyday situations. For example in one study, I investigated if acknowledging an overt stigma (e.g., a physical disability) could reduce stereotyping and discrimination. Acknowledging (or talking about) an overt stigma could reduce stereotyping and/or discrimination by allowing the non-stigmatized participant to stop thinking about the stigma and feel closer to the stigmatized target. At the same time, acknowledging an overt stigma could be a harmful strategy because it could direct more attention to it. For the study, we explored physically disabled job applicants because one of the provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits an interviewer from inquiring about a disability-making discussion of the stigma the sole responsibility of the stigmatized interviewee. We found overall hiring discrimination against the physically disabled applicant, but we also found that those who acknowledged their stigma were more likely to be hired than those who made no acknowledgment (Hebl & Skorinko, 2005). Moreover, the timing of the acknowledgment mattered: those who acknowledged sooner (towards the beginning or middle) were liked and hired more than those who acknowledged later (or never). Thus, in some instances, acknowledging an overt stigma can help improve interpersonal relationships and can reduce discrimination.
Perceptions of Others
The last major line of research I am interested in focuses on understanding how our perceptions of others (e.g., what we believe another person thinks about us) influences our self-views, our decisions, our stereotyping tendencies, and our interpersonal relationships.
Social Tuning. When interacting with others, individuals try to develop a sense of common ground (or shared reality) between themselves and others (see Hardin & Conley, 2001). Developing a shared reality can lead to more rewarding interpersonal relationships, and may lead individuals to align their views to match the apparent views of their partner. My collaborators and I examined how a desire for shared reality can lead people to align themselves towards their partner's apparent views and to self-stereotype themselves (Sinclair, Huntsinger, Skorinko, & Hardin, 2005). We found that those who had reason to get along with their interaction partner (e.g., high affiliative motivation) were more likely to align their views to the apparent views of that partner, even when this made them self-stereotype (e.g., see themselves as being gender traditional). In addition, we found that people protect themselves from self-stereotyping by socially distancing themselves from their partner when they had low affiliative motivation. Thus, people use their perceived views of others as a basis of how they see themselves in a given interaction based on their desire to get along with their partner.
Subtle Contextual Clues and Social Tuning. When aligning oneself with an interaction partner, do the apparent views need to be explicit? Can subtly conveyed views of others affect implicit views of the self? My collaborators and I investigated these questions by examining the extent to which an experimenter's subtle endorsement (wearing a t-shirt) of a particular attitude towards feminine beauty (e.g., that all body types are beautiful) could influence participants' implicit self-esteem. We found that in the control condition (wearing a blank t-shirt), heavier women had lower implicit self-esteem than normal weight women. However, participants in the subtle context condition aligned themselves with the subtle perceived views of the experimenter (e.g., all body types are beautiful) and this resulted in an elimination of the differences in implicit self-esteem for heavier and normal weight women, and even led to increases in implicit self-esteem for heavier women (Weisbuch, Sinclair, Skorinko, & Eccleston, under review). Thus, individuals can pick up on very subtle cues when aligning their views with others and this alignment can influence implicit self-views.
Perspective Taking. Recently, I have developed an interest in better understand the act of perspective taking (the ability to understand another person's point of view). In particular, I am excited to start research projects that apply perspective taking to both the past research I've conducted (e.g., is perspective taking a potential mechanism and motivation for social tuning?) and also to new research projects (e.g., how does perspective taking work as a strategy in the courtroom?, does perspective taking influence stereotyping?)
