Hardin Social Cognition Lab
| Current Projects | |
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Shared Reality & Social Tuning Various studies in the lab have found evidence of implicit and explicit attitude change (tuning) in the service of relationship management. This effect is predicted by Shared Reality Theory (SRT), which informs and directs the majority of the research questions and hypotheses in our lab. For SRT pdf's, click here (link to Dr. Hardin's homepage) |
Religiosity Studies A number of ongoing studies use subliminal priming tasks and IAT measures to research the effects of both short term and long term interpersonal relationships on implicit inter- and intra-religious prejudice and on self-ratings of religiosity. |
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Social Rejection Studies A number of studies conducted in the lab experimentally manipulate experiences of social exclusion and inclusion in order to assess various outcome measures, such as prejudice, self-stereotyping, and affiliative/pro-social behaviors directed toward others (including the rejectors). |
Self-Derogation Studies Ongoing experiments in our lab study the effects of affiliative motivation and political ideology on self-stereotyping and self-derogation. |
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Ambivalence Studies Ongoing studies look at the effects of interpersonal conflict and competing relational concerns on attitude ambivalence, attitude amplification, and the appeal of various social ideologies as potential social salves. |
Other topics too interesting to resist: Humor, embodied cognition, terror managment, system justification, evolution and attachment theory, language, and scapegoating. |
Our Research
Research in the Hardin Social Cognition Lab focuses on the interpersonal foundations of implicit and explicit cognition, including the self-concept, social identification, prejudice, stereotyping, and ideology. Using established and novel experimental paradigms in social psychology, we seek to identify and explain the conditions under which various relational and affiliative concerns affect cognitive processes and outcomes, and, in turn, the reciprocal effect of cognition on relationship dynamics. Taken together, our research demonstrates the utility of understanding basic information processing and attitude expression in the context of interpersonal dynamics.