Rebecca S. Frazier

Implicit social cognition: From measures to mechanisms

Most human cognition occurs outside conscious awareness or conscious control. Some of these implicit processes influence social perception, judgment and action. The past 15 years of research in implicit social cognition can be characterized as the Age of Measurement because of a proliferation of measurement methods and research evidence demonstrating their practical value for predicting human behavior. Implicit measures assess constructs that are distinct, but related, to self-report assessments, and predict variation in behavior that is not accounted for by those explicit measures. The present state of knowledge provides a foundation for the next age of implicit social cognition: clarification of the mechanisms underlying implicit measurement and how the measured constructs influence behavior.

Cumulative and Career-Stage Citation Impact of Social-Personality Psychology Programs and Their Members

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists’ seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.