The "Big Three" Social Categories, Social Perception, and Attitudes as Our Foci within Human Behavior

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Our 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.

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The Importance of Philosophy of Science and Behavioral Measurement

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Dr. Charlotte Tate’s supporting area of doctoral training at the University of Oregon was in philosophy of science. Dr. Tate is therefore interested in making the philosophical assumptions supporting the conduct of psychological science plain and clear in her investigations. Accordingly, in addition to publications that concern empirical evaluations of predictions and theories using collected data and statistics, our lab also publishes what the field refers to as “review papers” that seek to further articulate the assumptions and biases that importantly, but often tacitly, underpin approaches to the Big Three social categories in psychological science. Notably, we often seek to publish these review papers ahead of doing empirical research in order to make clear the arc of our own research programs and allow others to participate in these approaches as well.  

In terms of empirical research, our lab takes the abductive reasoning approach to conducting scientific inquiry, which was first articulated by philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce. Abductive reasoning can be contrasted with the popular hypothetico-deductive reasoning model in psychological science. Unlike the popular model of psychological science in which predictions are deduced from a relative complete theoretical model of that phenomenon, abductive logic requires scientists to reason to the best conclusions given the field’s current understanding (deductions) and the data at hand (inductions) (Peirce, 1992). Concretely, researchers are able to sensibly predict some aspects of the phenomenon under empirical investigation but not others ahead of (or a priori to) conducting the study. The aspects that cannot be predicted or deduced given current scientific understanding are instead evaluated as relationships of interest in the results (see Tate, 2011, p. 647, for a more detailed description). These empirically derived patterns can then form candidate replications and be used to create research theories that will eventually provide some deductive expectations about data patterns. The iterative interplay of induction and deduction is a cornerstone of the abductive approach.

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Stemming from her interest in philosophy of science, Dr. Tate endeavors to create the most precise measurement tools for collected data in psychological science given the field's current capabilities. As a result, much of the lab’s current focus is on developing more precise tools for the measurement of the Big Three social categories. These tools take the forms of demographic measures, attitudes scales, and reports of behavioral tendencies--all of which measure self-report as human behavior. To this end, Dr. Tate also emphasizes the importance of the connection between statistical inference and data structures for her own and other's work in various publications. Finally, the general approach of the lab is consistent with completely consistent with the social construction approach of sociologist Dr. Peter L. Berger (1963), in which social information is represented at individual level, and this individual-level representation allows for variability across social perceivers.

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References:

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Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to sociology: A humanistic perspective. New York: Doubleday.

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Peirce, C. S. (1992). Reasoning and the logic of things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.