Research

1) Identifying and reducing the influence of social information in judgment

How can we know when social information biases behavior? We have sought to make progress on this question by developing a new measure, The Judgment Bias Task (Axt, Nguyen & Nosek, 2018). The JBT is a flexible and reliable method for assessing individual differences in social judgment biases (more information about the JBT can be found in the Resources page). Since its development, we’ve used the JBT to investigate ongoing issues concerning how biases in social judgment can best be reduced (Axt & Lai, 2019; Axt, Yang & Deshpande, 2022). In the future, we hope to use the JBT and other novel laboratory or field measures of biased behavior to test various bias-reduction strategies.

2) Understanding implicit and explicit attitudes

How are our attitudes shaped by our identities and surroundings? And how well do these attitudes relate to other psychological processes? In another line of research, we explore how group status and culture impact implicit attitudes (Axt, Moran & Bar-Anan, 2018; Axt, Atwood, Talhelm & Hehman, 2022), whether such attitudes change over time (Stern & Axt, 2022), and how well measures of implicit and explicit attitudes predict relevant beliefs and behavior (Axt, Bar-Anan & Vianello, 2019; Kurdi, Seitchik, Axt, Carroll, Karapetyan, Kaushik, Tomezsko, Greenwald, A.G., & Banaji, 2019; Axt, Conway, Buttrick & Westgate, 2021).

3) Creating advances in measurement and analysis

All researchers benefit from innovations in methodologiess and improvements in measurement. Past efforts from the lab on this issue have developed new measures (Axt, Nguyen & Nosek, 2018) or applied existing measures to novel contexts (Atwood & Atwood, 2021). We have also used large samples to better understand how to measure implicit and explicit attitudes (Axt, 2018; Hester, Siemers, Axt & Hehman, 2022; Axt, Buttrick & Feng, 2023).