Morality has been viewed as a core aspect of the self and even a basic psychological need. Strategies for regulating threats to moral self-views may therefore be distinct from regulating threats to other self-aspects. Consistent with research on the regulation of basic psychological needs, I hypothesized that threats to the...
Cultural appropriation is a topic well-discussed in public discourse and theorized in the philosophical literature, however, it remains vastly understudied in psychology. Existing conversations center on whether cultural appropriation even exists, how it is defined, and if there are psychological and social impacts of being appropriated. No research to date...
Listeners can experience strong and often positive identification with music. Contemporary research has emphasized the importance of a listener’s own identity, including their sense of self and their desires, when forming such identifications. However, acknowledgments of the listener’s role in the listening experience have failed to productively engage discussions of...
While the proportion of students from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds enrolled in higher education continues to increase, rates of upward SES mobility among people from the
lower end of the socioeconomic distribution remain extremely low and socioeconomic inequality
in the United States continues to rise. The current manuscript examines...
The prospect of being evaluated by others is oftentimes psychologically crippling. At the core of feeling evaluated is perceiving other minds capable of possessing (judgmental) thoughts and feelings. While research on mind perception in evaluative situations oftentimes examines positive aspects (e.g., increased prosocial behavior), this dissertation looks into how mind...
Competitive gaming, or esports, is a high-skill endeavor embedded in a highly gendered social context. Using multiple methodological approaches, this dissertation argues that gender-gaming inequality is a result of changeable stereotypes that impact women throughout their lives. Specifically, gender-gaming stereotypes limit women’s initial access to gaming, discourage their continued interest...
How do people make meaning of risk-taking? The present dissertation proposes a normative lay theory of risk-taking. The proposed model promotes the following core ideas: (a) Risk-taking is generally an ambiguous construct and requires the illumination of at least some dimensional parameters to disambiguate the risk behavior and risk-taker; (b)...
Employees’ social class backgrounds remain a critical but often overlooked source of inequality in white-collar workplaces: employees from working-class backgrounds are less likely to be hired, less likely to advance to leadership positions, and earn less on average than their counterparts from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, even with the same...
Multiteam systems (MTSs), or teams of teams, have recently become a standard for collaboration—ranging from traditional office teams to those setting a course for Mars. Although leadership is often identified as a critical lever for effective MTS functioning and success, there is little research to inform the question of how...
How do perceivers stereotype people who are at the margins of multiple, interlocking social identities? The present dissertation proposes and tests a model of intersectional stereotyping called intersectional categorization theory (ICT). This model advocates the following core ideas: (a) that perceivers use one lens at a time for making sense...