Helen C. Harton

Political orientation and modern versus aversive racism: tests of Dovidio and Gaertner's (1998) integrated model.

According to J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertners (1998) integrated model of racism, politically liberal European Americans tend to express racism differently than conservative European Americans, with liberals demonstrating aversive racism and conservatives, symbolic or modern racism. In support of the model, in Experiment 1 liberals showed bias in favor of a twice-prosecuted African American relative to a European American in their judgment of double jeopardy, whereas conservatives did the reverse. Experiment 2 replicated these effects while eliminating a confound in the design of Experiment 1. Experiment 3 found evidence for the intrapsychic conflict hypothesized to underlie aversive racism. Specifically, only liberals displayed greater physiological arousal to the touch of an African American versus a European American experimenter.

The Effects of Emergent Norms and Attitudes on Recycling Behavior

Residence hall residents indicated their attitudes about recycling and their perceptions of whether friends and family believed they should recycle at the beginning and toward the end of a semester. They also reported their recycling behavior at the end of the semester. Attitudes, but not subjective norms, predicted behavior, and participants became more similar to their fellow group members in attitudes and behavior over time. Attitudes and fellow group member behavior best predicted recycling, supporting the theory of reasoned action, dynamic social impact theory, and their integration.

When my country is at war: Issue importance and interpersonal influence lead Iraq War attitudes to cluster within social networks

Two studies investigated how issue importance and interpersonal influence contribute to the development of shared attitudes among social network members (i.e., attitude clustering). Study 1 used the start of the 2003 Iraq War as a natural experiment on the role of issue importance in attitude clustering within residential conversation networks. Attitudes toward the U.S. involvement in Iraq grew more clustered after—but not before—the start of the Iraq War, and this post-war growth in attitude clustering was greater for this issue relative to other political issues. Study 2, using structural equation modeling (SEM), found support for a sequential mediation model whereby personal importance of the Iraq War increases war-relevant information seeking, which increases discussion of the issue, which in turn increases attitude clustering within egoistic social networks. Overall, these results illustrate how intrapersonal attitude processes can catalyze interpersonal influence processes.

Tattoo or taboo? Tattoo stigma and negative attitudes toward tattooed individuals

ABSTRACT Tattoos are common in the United States; however, tattooed persons may be perceived as having more negative character and as more deviant than people without tattoos. College students (Study 1) and community members (Study 2) viewed images of men and women with tattoos or the same images with the tattoos digitally removed and rated the targets’ characteristics. Half of the participants viewed a target with a tattoo, and half viewed that target without it, allowing for both within- (participants all rated one male and one female target with a tattoo and another without) and between-participants (participants rated either the tattooed or non-tattooed version of a single target) comparisons. Tattooed targets, especially women, were rated as stronger and more independent, but were rated more negatively on other character attributes than the same target images with the tattoos removed. The stigma associated with tattoos appears to still exist, despite the prevalence of tattoos in modern culture.

Clustering of worry appraisals among college students

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the potential clustering of worry appraisals within college social networks. Participants living in campus residence buildings responded to online surveys across the course of several months. Worry appraisals were measured 10 weeks into the fall semester and again approximately 6 months later. Analysis of sociometric data suggests that the majority of participants’ social interactions occurred within their respective residence building floors, indicating that proximity strongly influenced the development of social network ties and sources of social influence. Further, significant clustering of worry appraisals occurred across time, and more importantly, within residence building floors. The present findings compliment previous work suggesting that several physical and psychological states appear to spread and cluster within social networks. Implications for the study of emotional appraisals and future research are discussed.