Indiana University Bloomington

Dr. Eliot R. Smith


Professor of Psychology
War Years Chancellor's Professor

 

 

Contact Information

Office: PY 354
Office Phone: 812-856-0196
Lab: PY A316
Lab Phone:812-856-1350
E-mail:

E-mail Eliot Smith

Web site: https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/wiki/site/1112985513786-138474/lab%20website%20home.html

 

Educational Background

  • 1971 - B.S., magna cum laude, Harvard College
  • 1975 - Ph.D., Harvard University

Areas of Study

  • Social Psychology

Research Topics

  • Role of intergroup emotions (emotions experienced with respect to one's collective self as a group member) in prejudice and intergroup relations
  • New conceptualizations of cognition as situated and embodied and their implications for social cognition
  • Connectionist or neural network models in social psychology
  • Social cognition in general, particularly the nature of mental representations of persons and groups and their effects on social judgments, including person perception and stereotyping.

Research Summary:

Much of my research examines the ways people perceive members of their own and other social groups, evaluate them positively or negatively, and behave toward them. In particular, recent research (in collaboration with Diane Mackie of the University of California, Santa Barbara) has focused on the role of emotions in prejudice and intergroup behavior. The core insight of social identity theory and related viewpoints such as self-categorization theory is that an important social group membership becomes part of a person's self. This assumption means that, like any aspect of the self, group membership takes on motivational and affective significance. A new theory of intergroup emotions arises from combining this assumption with appraisal theories of emotion. In this theory, prejudice involves emotional reactions to an out-group based on appraisals of its relationship to the in-group (such as threat). In turn, these group-based emotions may lead to discriminatory behaviors toward the out-group. Aspects of this new theory have been tested and confirmed in several studies.



Representative Publications

Books:
  • 2002 - Mackie, D. M., & Smith, E. R. (Eds.). Beyond prejudice: From outgroup hostility to intergroup emotions. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
  • 2000 - Smith, E. R., & Mackie, D. M.. Social psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
Journal Articles:
  • 2004 - Miller, D.A., Smith, E.R., & Mackie, D.M.. Effects of intergroup contact and political predispositions on prejudice: Role of intergroup emotions. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 7, 221-237.
  • 2004 - Castelli, L., Zogmaister, C., Smith, E.R., & Arcuri, L.. On the automatic evaluation of social exemplars. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 373-387.
  • 2002 - Semin, G.R., & Smith, E.R.. Interfaces of social psychology and situated and embodied cognition. Cognitive Systems Research, 3, 385-396.
  • 2002 - Queller, S., & Smith, E. R.. Subtyping versus bookkeeping in stereotype learning and change: Connectionist simulations and empirical findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 300-313.
  • 2000 - Mackie, D.M., Devos, T., & Smith, E.R.. Intergroup emotions: Explaining offensive action tendencies in an intergroup context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 602-616.
  • 2000 - Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J.. Dual process models in social and cognitive psychology: Conceptual integration and links to underlying memory systems. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 108-131.
  • 2000 - Coats, S., Smith, E.R., Claypool, H., & Banner, M.. Overlapping mental representations of self and in-group: Response time evidence and its relationship with explicit measures of group identification. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 302-315.
Other Publications:
  • in press - Brown, R., Smith, E.R., & Mackie, D.M.. It's about time: Intergroup emotions as time-dependent phenomena. To appear in R.Bround & D. CApozza (Eds.), Social Identities: Motivational, Emotional, Cultural Influences. New York: Psychology Press.
  • in press - Smith, E.R., & Neumann, R.. Emotion Considered From the Perspective of Dual-Process Models. In L. Feldman Barrett, P. Niedenthal, & P. Winkielman (Eds.), Emotion: Conscious and Unconscious. New York: Guilford.
  • 2004 - Smith, E.R., & Semin, G.R.. Socially situated cognition: Cognition in its social context. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53 - 117.
  • 2002 - Smith, E.R.. Overlapping mental representations of self and group: Evidence and implications. In J.P. Forgas & K.D. Williams (Eds.), The social self: Cognitive, interpersonal, and intergroup perspectives (pp. 21-35). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
  • 2002 - Mackie, D.M., & Smith, E.R.. Intergroup emotions: Prejudice reconceptualized as differentiated reactions to out-groups. In J.P. Forgas & K.D. Williams (Eds.), The social self: Cognitive, interpersonal and intergroup perspectives (pp. 309-326). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
  • 2001 - Smith, E. R., & Queller, S.. Memory representations. In A. Tesser & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook in social psychology, Vol. I: Intraindividual processes (pp. 111-133). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
  • 2000 - Smith, E. R.. Research design. In H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in social psychology (pp. 17-39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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