List of social psychologists

A social psychologist who investigates how another person’s emotion influences judgment and behavior. In computer-mediated negotiation experiments, information about an opponent’s anger or happiness changed participants’ concessions. The experiments distinguish using emotion as information about an opponent’s limits from simply experiencing the same emotion.^[ref]

A researcher in facial mimicry and emotion recognition. Her experiments with dynamic facial expressions measured observers’ facial responses and their judgments of the displayed emotion, allowing the relationship between mimicry and decoding to be tested rather than assumed. The cited author record identifies the psychology researcher.^[ref]

A researcher in social appraisal and interpersonal emotion transfer. A three-week diary study examined how one person’s changing emotion related to another’s appraisals and emotion. Such work separates responding to another person’s interpretation of an event from treating emotional contagion as an automatic copying process.^[ref]

A social psychologist whose research includes the mere-exposure effect and relationships between evaluation and recognition memory.

A social psychologist whose research includes experimental tests of the facial feedback hypothesis.^[ref]

A researcher in emotion who coauthored a meta-analysis of experimental tests of the facial feedback hypothesis with Nicholas A. Coles and Jeff T. Larsen. The synthesis found small average changes in reported emotion after facial manipulations, with differences across tasks and outcome measures.^[ref]

A researcher in emotion who coauthored a meta-analysis of the facial feedback hypothesis with Nicholas A. Coles and Heather C. Lench. Their analysis distinguishes reported emotional experience from evaluations of emotional stimuli, helping explain why the apparent size of facial-feedback effects depends on what an experiment measures.^[ref]

A researcher who tested the facial feedback hypothesis by synthesizing experiments that manipulated facial movement and measured reported emotion. His 2019 meta-analysis with Jeff T. Larsen and Heather C. Lench found a small average effect whose size varied across experimental conditions. It distinguishes a pooled effect from the reliability of any one facial manipulation.^[ref]

A researcher who studied the relationship between facial expression, emotion and social interaction. Field studies of bowlers and soccer fans combined observations of smiling with participants’ reports of happiness. Happy participants smiled much more often during social interaction than when alone, showing why a smile cannot be read as an unqualified measure of happiness.^[ref]

A social psychologist who investigated smiling through naturalistic observation. Studies of bowlers, sports spectators and pedestrians compared social engagement with circumstances expected to evoke happiness. Smiling tracked interaction more consistently than favorable events, motivating a communicative account of facial expression alongside accounts based on felt emotion.^[ref]

A social psychologist who investigated nonmonotonic associations between lifetime adversity and later functioning.^[ref]

Timothy D. Wilson is a social psychologist whose research includes limits of introspection about the causes of judgment. With Richard E. Nisbett, he examined whether verbal explanations reveal the processes that produced a response or instead draw on plausible causal accounts. The distinction motivates experiments comparing reported reasons with independently manipulated influences. It concerns access to causal processes, rather than implying that every report of a feeling or experience is false. ^[ref]

A social psychologist who, with Timothy D. Wilson, examined limits on people’s reports of their own cognitive processes. Their analysis argued that explanations of judgments can draw on plausible causal beliefs rather than direct access to the processes producing a judgment. This distinguishes a sincere verbal explanation from independent evidence of a cognitive mechanism.^[ref]

Justin Kruger is a social psychologist who coauthored the original study associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect. Participants completed tasks and estimated their performance, allowing actual scores and self-assessments to be compared. Interpreting a grouped confidence-accuracy pattern requires separating an account about metacognition from effects of noisy measurement and selection on observed scores; the published pattern alone does not identify one exclusive mechanism. ^[ref]

David Dunning studies social judgment and self-evaluation. With Justin Kruger, he compared actual task scores with people’s estimates of their own performance in the original Dunning-Kruger effect study. The comparison separates measured ability, confidence and relative-rank judgments, making calibration a question for evidence rather than a conclusion from confidence alone. ^[ref]

Thomas F. Pettigrew studied intergroup contact and prejudice. His meta-analysis compared evidence across studies rather than relying on one contact setting. Examining conditions and generalization helps distinguish an average association from a claim that every possible encounter reduces prejudice. ^[ref]

A social psychologist who compared approaches to reducing prejudice through group identity. Experiments manipulated the salience of subgroup differences and an overarching common identity. This allows tests of whether recognizing distinct subgroup identities within a shared group changes intergroup bias, rather than assuming that all subgroup distinctions must disappear.^[ref]

John F. Dovidio studied how recategorization changes responses to members of another group. Experiments varied whether participants represented two small groups as a more inclusive group and measured evaluations, disclosure and helping. Comparing several outcomes tests whether a change in verbal evaluation also extends to behavior. ^[ref]

Samuel L. Gaertner studied intergroup bias and the common ingroup identity model. Comparing representations of one group, two groups or separate individuals tests how group boundaries influence evaluation. The manipulation concerns how people categorize a situation, rather than assuming that changing a group label removes every source of prejudice. ^[ref]

A researcher who examined claims connecting violent video games with later aggression. A 2020 meta-analysis of longitudinal studies evaluated pooled associations alongside study quality. This approach asks how methodological choices affect the estimated relationship and distinguishes longitudinal prediction from a demonstrated causal effect.^[ref]

A researcher who synthesized longitudinal studies of violent video game play and subsequent physical aggression. The 2018 meta-analysis combined 24 prospective studies and compared models adjusting for initial aggression and additional covariates. The work illustrates how conclusions about change depend on baseline adjustment and remaining confounding.^[ref]

A researcher who tested associations between violent video game engagement and adolescent aggression using a registered report. The study paired adolescents’ game reports with carers’ reports of behavior and specified confirmatory analyses in advance. Its null result concerns the sampled association and measures, rather than establishing that every possible gaming effect is absent.^[ref]

A researcher who investigated how childhood viewing of television violence predicts later aggression. A longitudinal study followed childhood measures into young adulthood and examined alternative explanatory covariates. Such a design establishes temporal ordering, while interpretation of the relationship still requires attention to confounding and how viewing and behavior were measured.^[ref]

Rachael E. Jack studied facial expression and cross-cultural emotion recognition using generated facial movements and reverse correlation. Reconstructing which visual features observers use tests the assumed correspondence between an emotion label and a face. Cross-cultural differences challenge a universal mapping without implying that no facial information is shared. ^[ref]

A researcher in facial expression who compared spontaneous expressions of blind and sighted athletes. Including people blind from birth tests whether visually observing other people’s faces is necessary for the expressions studied. Similarities across groups inform the role of visual learning without implying that social context never modifies emotional displays.^[ref]

A researcher who investigated cross-cultural recognition of facial expressions. His 1971 study tested how participants in New Guinea matched photographs to emotion-eliciting stories. Agreement across populations supports some shared expression–situation mappings, while the story and photograph choices define what the task can establish about everyday emotion recognition.^[ref]

A researcher who studied cultural variation in social attribution. Comparisons of American and Chinese explanations used both animated physical events and accounts of social events. The work asks how explanatory habits favor properties of an individual or features of a situation, rather than attributing every judgment to a fixed personal disposition.^[ref]

A social psychologist who tested how cognitive load affects social attribution. Experiments required observers to judge another person while occupied with an additional task. Their results motivated a distinction between forming an initial characterization and correcting it for situational constraints: an explanation may depend on the processing resources available to the observer.^[ref]

Edward E. Jones studied social attribution, including how observers infer a writer’s attitudes from an essay. Comparing assigned and freely chosen positions tests whether observers account for constraints on the writer. The design separates information about the expressed position from information about the freedom to select it. ^[ref]