Research Approach and Foci
Preamble
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In the early 2000s, when I started researching the topics of both U.S. race/ethnicity and gender identity by combining individual difference and social psychology perspectives, my research was not easily understood within either traditional personality science or traditional social psychology research. Consequently, I called my research lab the SPAMS Lab--both as an acronym for the specific research foci but also as a way to make light of the idea that people did not want to hear about the research at the time (in the Internet Age use of "spamming" someone). Over the intervening years, this combined perspective (of using both personality and social psychology approaches) has become more accepted, and even gained a measure of popularity, but I like to remind my lab members and audiences reading this website that the research approach used to be considered outside the mainstream in the early days.
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Human Behavior Research Foci
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My research and my lab's research focuses on “The Big Three” social categories in United States culture: gender, race, and sexual identity. We approach each of these social categories as research domains from the complementary perspectives of self-perception (viz. identity dynamics) and social perception (viz. the perception of these categories by others who are not the self). Though traditionally treated as different topics within social psychology, our lab combines these foci under the “Social Perception” heading that is the first part of our lab name (donating the SP to our lab acronym: SPAMS). (This approach is similar to approaches taken by personality psychologists and thereby illustrates our integrated social-personality approach.)
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Adding a layer of complexity to the complementary perspectives within our social perception approach, we also focus on attitudes that individuals have regarding the Big Three social categories as defined above. The attitudes approach also features complementary perspectives, focusing on self-directed attitudes (e.g., self-esteem) and other-directed attitudes (e.g., outgroup prejudice, ingroup prejudice). We also study the behavioral component of bias commonly called discrimination, which, importantly, can occur in the absence of overtly negative attitudes. In this way, our lab approaches research from the larger “psychology of evaluation” standpoint, in which we are able to focus on attitudes and discrimination. (This approach donates the A to our lab acronym.)
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Our lab merges the two overarching themes of social perception and attitudes into our primary lines of research. Thus, we might be viewed at this point primarily as a SPA lab.
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A tertiary line of research in our lab is in the realm of mental simulation (donating the MS to our SPAMS lab acronym). In this tertiary line of research, we explore people’s “mental time travel” into the past (as counterfactual thinking, counteractual thinking, or retrospection) and into the future (variously called prefactual thinking, forecasting, or prospection). Previous projects focused on the cognitive architecture of mental simulation. Future projects will integrate mental simulation into the social perception and attitudinal (self- and other-directed) approaches to the Big Three social categories that we study.
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Inclusive Approach from the Outset
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It is also worth noting that a key feature of our lab’s approach to psychological science is to be as inclusive in our thinking and data collection as possible from the outset. Consequently, we approach each of the Big Three social categories from the most inclusive perspective possible. Our lab believes that starting from an inclusive place of theory and research is a hallmark of any useful scientific investigation. Unfortunately, the history of the life sciences is rife with examples of non-inclusive approaches to social phenomena, which tend to lead to under-developed understandings and roadblocks to scientific progress.
