Most of my research involves the overlapping areas of attitude formation and change, implicit social cognition, racial prejudice, and intergroup relations. With respect to attitude formation and change, we have developed a conditioning paradigm that allows us to study how people come to evaluate objects in their environment either positively or negatively without their conscious awareness. We’ve demonstrated that attitudes can develop without such awareness (that is, subliminal persuasion) and we’re currently addressing questions regarding when evaluative conditioning occurs: for which kinds of people, and under what boundary conditions, and through what sorts of processes.

In related work, we attempt to uncover pre-existing automatic (and unconscious) information in the mind using procedures that have the potential to uncover a person’s feelings and beliefs without having to ask the person explicitly. These “implicit measures” include sequential priming, the Implicit Association Test, and several older techniques like the Thematic Apperception Test. We’re currently trying to better understand just what it is that these measures are getting at, as well as how the measures relate to one another.

Finally, our lab has a long-standing interest in racial prejudice, and we address basic questions about how prejudice develops, how it is detected, and how it manifests in behavior using some of the approaches mentioned above. We often examine the interaction between automatic information and more thoughtful, deliberate cognitions on race-related judgments and behaviors. Most recently, we’ve developed a paradigm that allows us to study one-on-one interactions between members of different groups. Using this paradigm, we’re investigating how racial attitudes, motivation to control prejudiced reactions, and contextual factors affect verbal and nonverbal behavior in interactions between Blacks and Whites.