BROADLY

Although people have the palpable feeling that they can accurately introspect about their beliefs and actions, social psychology finds that this feeling is often incorrect. In my work with my advisor Brian Nosek in the Implicit Social Cognition Lab at the University of Virginia, I investigate how and when thoughts and feelings outside of conscious control or awareness can influence beliefs, actions, and judgments. Specifically, I am interested in (a) how group identification and intergroup attitudes operate among members of stigmatized groups for which the boundaries are both permeable and impermanent, such as age groups; and (b) how belief systems, such as religious or political ideology, interact with or influence the formation and maintenance of implicit biases.

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Aging – Attitudes and Identity

I view age identity and preferences as a domain that can refine social psychology’s understanding of how group identity and intergroup attitudes work. Age differs from other social groups (e.g., gender and race) because the definitions of what “old” and “young” mean vary considerably, especially in comparison to one’s own age. Also unlike other social categories, age group membership is impermanent — barring premature death, young people will eventually become old. However, compared to attitudes toward other social groups (e.g., see Nosek, Smyth, et al., 2007), implicit age attitudes (1) demonstrate one of the largest effects favoring the dominant group, (2) demonstrate one of the weakest associations with self-reported group attitudes ever observed, and (3) fail to be moderated by individuals’ age group membership (as social-identity theories would expect). My primary line of research extends social psychology’s abiding interest in stereotyping and prejudice to understand these findings. As such, I have investigated (a) why age identity diverges from other social identities (Lindner & Nosek, 2008, 2010, in prep.); (b) the structure underlying the constructs of implicit and explicit age biases (in my dissertation and Lindner & Nosek, 2011); and (c) how bias "spills over" into behavior and discrimination, particularly in real-world contexts like employment (current research, and Lindner, Nosek, & Graser, 2009, 2011).

Implicit Attitudes as National Indicators

In collaboration with Project Implicit researchers around the world, I have contributed to research evaluating whether implicit preferences can serve as national-level indicators of behavior or overall evaluations toward social groups. Recently, I contributed to research that found that national averages of citizens’ implicit, but not self-reported, gender-science stereotypes reflected nations’ sex differences in both science and math achievement on a standardized examination of 8th graders (Nosek et al., 2009, PNAS). These results suggest that implicit stereotypes may contribute to, or at least serve as national indicators of, gender gaps in science engagement and achievement. In my dissertation, I found that among 99 nations, national averages of implicit and explicit age attitudes favored young more strongly among nations where older adults (aged 60+) made up a larger proportion of the population. This relationship persisted when accounting for nations’ socioeconomic modernization and their collectivist orientation. This suggests that national levels of age attitudes reflect the cumulative, cultural positivity or negativity of social information about different age groups and could serve as a national indicator of age bias.

Religious and Political Ideology

This secondary line of research grew out of the realization that my childhood immersion in the details of Protestant theology (as the daughter of an Evangelical Calvinist minister) could broaden social psychology’s understanding of ideology. In this line of research, I seek to understand how individual differences in political and religious ideology affect individuals’ attitudes and behavior, often in unintended ways. In my master’s thesis research (Lindner & Nosek, SPSP 2007, Political Psychology 2009), I found that although individuals asserted that their principles determined their judgments, both their political ideology and implicit ethnic biases influenced whether they extended political tolerance to legal but ideologically-extreme speech on both sides of the political spectrum, when the speaker’s ethnicity also varied. Because of my interest in ideology, I supervised the honors thesis research of undergraduate Oth Vilaythong Tran, in which we tested whether experimentally priming a religious message of tolerance (the Golden Rule) affected Christians’ or Buddhists’ tolerance toward gay people (Vilaythong, Lindner, & Nosek, 2010). My future goal in this line of research is to better understand how, why, and when implicit biases spill over into judgments and behavior across situations, as well as whether the explicit suppression or counteracting of one’s own bias can itself become automatic.