Text Box:                                Core Research Topic:                                                                                  What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La

Text Box:  Illness                                                                                  What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La Text Box:  Cognition & Behavior                                                                                  What is Hot Cognition? My Hot Cognition La

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                        

                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box:   "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." --Thomas and Thomas (1928)       This famous quote expresses the symbolic interactionist credo that individual behavior is guided by what people (both men and women I presume) believe to be true rather than by "truth" as defined by some objective or consensual standard.  This belief in the causal role of the subjective in behavior has, mostly implicitly, been the driving force behind social psychology's intense interest in cognitive processes, and particularly in the errors and biases that plague social judgments.  If I believe my neighbor to be hostile, I am apt to behave toward him as if he is a hostile person.  To understand and predict my behavior, it makes no difference whether my neighbor, in fact, bears any hostile intention toward me because my behavior derives not from him directly but from my perception of him.  Once one accepts this fundamental link between the subjective definition of a situation and behavior, then understanding the origins and content of perceptions (and especially misperceptions) becomes a central task of any behavioral science.          When I was in graduate school during the early 1980's, John Jemmott (my advisor), Bob Croyle (my good friend and fellow Princeton graduate student at the time), and I applied this same logic to begin to explore the errors and biases that underlie how people think about health and illness.  Many of the early studies used an experimental procedure I developed in graduate school to examine the cognitive and motivational determinants of people's reactions to unfavorable medical diagnoses in a highly-controlled laboratory situation. As such, these studies represented both a novel conceptual approach to the field of health psychology--by importing to it the "judgmental bias" approach that had been used so profitably in research on social judgment--as well as a novel methodological approach--by demonstrating the power and feasibility of laboratory experimentation to a field that had until that time relied almost exclusively on non-experimental techniques to examine health-related judgments.     Other work we have done in this area has examined how people's beliefs about physicians can affect treatment-seeking behavior, and how stereotypes and expectations can interfere with effective doctor-patient interactions, but all of it demonstrates the rich potential for cross-pollination that exists between basic theory and research in social cognition and research on health-related judgments and behavior.   The concepts and methods of social cognition can provide important insights to help understand, and ultimately improve, people's utilization of and adherence to appropriate medical treatments. At the same time, the health domain provides fertile ground for testing general principles of information-processing equally relevant to health-related and non-health-related decisions, particularly those regarding the role of motivational factors in judgment.   Key Readings in Illness Cognition and Behavior:    

                                            

Text Box: Jemmott, J. B. III, Ditto, P. H., & Croyle, R. T.  (1986).  Judging health status:  Effects of perceived     prevalence and personal relevance.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 899-905 Ditto, P. H., & Jemmott, J. B. III  (1989).  From rarity to evaluative extremity:  Effects of prevalence information on evaluations of positive and negative characteristics.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 16-26.   Croyle, R. T., & Ditto, P. H.  (1990).  Illness cognition and behavior:  An experimental approach. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 13, 31-52. for a full list of papers on this topic to return to Ditto Home   minar in social psychology, and specialized seminars in social cognition and related topics whenever I can.  Below  links to