Text Box: The Research Text Box: The People

Text Box: Current Research Projects in the Hot Cognition Lab Text Box: The Mission: The judgments that make up the most pivotal points in our lives are seldom made dispassionately.  We call our group the Hot Cognition Laboratory (HCL for short) because of our interest in understanding the passionate side of human judgment.  We are interested in how people make judgments in emotionally-charged and motivationally-involving situations, and particularly in how emotion and motivation can shape (and often bias) our reasoning processes, and ultimately, our beliefs about ourselves and the world.    Our research program has a dual focus.  Our first goal is to develop, using state-of-the-art empirical methods, a richer theoretical understanding of the role of emotion and motivation in judgment and decision making processes.  A second and equally important goal, however, is to conduct psychological studies that inform contemporary social problems.  Because judgments of consequence invariably involve feeling, a full understanding about how people think about politics, medicine, morality and the law will only come when we appreciate that when it comes to the decisions that affect our lives most profoundly, passion and reason are inextricably intertwined.         f f   Text Box: (click topics for specific information and papers)                                      (click picture for lab member info and more pictures)               f f   Text Box: To find a list of Professor Ditto's select published articles,               f f  

Text Box: Yourmorals.org:  This is a collaboration between our lab and Jon Haidt's at the University of Virginia.  Yourmorals.org is a website designed to collect data on connections between people's political beliefs and attitudes and their moral reasoning.  The site allows visitors to complete a series of scales measuring moral principles, personality characteristics, and political attitudes.  It also asks for people's reactions to various moral dilemmas.  Feel free to visit the site and complete some (or all!) of the questionnaires. To visit the yourmorals.org   Motivated Use of Moral Principles:  In collaboration with David Pizarro of Cornell University and Eric Uhlmann of Yale University, we are conducting a number of studies examining people's tendency to selectively recruit general moral principles to support desired moral conclusions.  Much of this work examines the moral rationalizations of political liberals and conservatives.   Motivated Attributions of Intentional Actions:  Whether or not an action is perceived as intentional is usually thought of as a precursor to moral judgment (e.g., hitting someone is more morally reprehensible if the hit was intentional rather than unintentional).  We have now run several experiments, however, showing that the intentionality-moral evaluation relation can also go the other way.  Judgments of intentionality can be affected by moral evaluations such that the same act is perceived as more intentional the more morally reprehensible it is to the perceiver.    Perceptions of "Maverick" Politicians:  People overwhelming endorse positive attitudes about politicians who buck their political party to "vote their conscience."  But when real world politicians vote their conscience, they are often viewed much less positively, especially by members of their own party (exhibits A & B: John McCain and Joe Lieberman).  We have now conducted several studies documenting this "paradox of the maverick."  We are currently examining limits on and explanations for this phenomenon.   Mortality Salience and Morality Salience:  A number of studies have shown that subtle reminders of our own mortality can affect our political judgments.  Some studies seem to show that mortality salience makes people more conservative, others that it seems merely to extremitize people's pre-existing ideological leanings.  We are currently examining a related but somewhat more complex hypothesis: that mortality salience tends to "moralize" people – leading them to think about the world in moral rather than pragmatic terms.  This effect can have complicated effects on people's political ideology.   Political Ideology & Dispositional Inference:  A key aspect of the conservative ideology (at least in the U.S.) is the belief that people are responsible for their own outcomes in life.  Conversely, the liberal ideology is more likely to see situational forces as powerful determinants of people's moral choices and economic outcomes.  Building on the work of Linda Skitka (University of Illinois, Chicago), we are documenting and examining explanations for this relation between political ideology and dispositional inference.   Mirror Image Political Stereotypes: The highly polarized climate in U.S. politics has led members of the two major political parties to be viewed increasingly as distinct "groups" -- even to the extent of having their own unique "cultures".  This project takes this group metaphor seriously by examining the stereotypes that Democrats and Republicans hold about each other.  One interesting finding from this research is the prevalence of "mirror image" stereotypes in which both groups characterize the other group in similar terms (e.g, ., both Republicans and Democrats view their rival group as more hypocritical and less intelligent than their group).  This is reminiscent of the pattern that was found to characterize Soviet-American perceptions during the Cold War.   Visceral Influences on Judgment  In a recent study (published in a special issue of the Journal of Behavior Decision Making), we found that people were less sensitive to risk information when they were gambling to win chocolate chip cookies that they could see and smell than when the cookies were only described (Ditto et al, 2006).  Psychologists have done extensive research on the role of mood, emotion, and motivation on judgment, but the role of visceral/sensory factors in judgment and behavior has received little attention.  Our lab is interested in examining visceral influences on judgment  their role in self-regulation processes, and more generally, how people respond differently to the same stimulus when it is experienced in a form that is viscerally-rich vs. viscerally-impoverished.   Automatic Optimism:  One of the most well-established findings in social psychology is that people's judgment tend to be overly optimistic.  We have conducted several studies showing that one contributor to our optimism is an automatic tendency to assume that good rather than bad things will happen (Lench & Ditto, 2007).  We continue to be interested in documenting the automatic nature of optimism and its relation to similar phenomenon such as implicit egotism.   Psychic Numbing and the Value of Human Life:  People often seem to respond callously to death at a distance.  We are interested in this "psychic numbing" effect, and more generally, in the factors that affect how people place value on human life.  A particular focus of this work in on how people think about the killing of innocents as so-called "collateral damage" in wars.    Motivated Sensitivity to Frame Evolution:  Political scientists have long noted the importance of framing in political discourse.  Framing serves to highlight the advantageous aspects of an issue for one side or another such as when conservatives characterize their views about abortion as "pro-life" (directing attention to the innocent child) while liberals characterize their view as 'pro-choice" (directing attention to the rights of the mother).  Similarly, politicians often change frames over time to gain political advantage in changing political climates.  An example would be the Bush Administration's changing of  their framing of the Iraq War from one of U.S. self-interest (protecting us from Saddam Hussein's WMD's) to one of humanitarian concern (liberating Iraqi's from a brutal dictator and promoting democracy).  We are interested in when people are likely to be sensitive to this kind of frame evolution, and have some evidence that political opponents are more sensitive to changing frames than political allies.