A Seriously Psychological Page

Some praise at morning what they blame at night,
But always think the last opinion right.
-- Alexander Pope

Mind and world in short have evolved together, and in consequence are something of a mutual fit.
-- William James

Resources

Social Psychology

Resource Pages: The definitive social cognition reference page: Elliot R. Smith's Social Cognition Paper Archive and Information Center; and The Social Psychology Network page, another impressive set of links.

Organizations: the Society for Personality and Social Psychology [Div. 8, APA]; the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues [Div. 9, APA]; the Social and Personality Section of CPA; the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists. [Note: You can find a more comprehensive set of links at the sites given above.]

Related (Sub)Disciplines: the International Organization for Conflict Management (negotiators in business (mostly) and politics/diplomacy (less commonly)). the International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology. Eclectic DVs - IVs often related to identity, culture. International Society for Political Psychology.

Social Psychology Journals: the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; the European Journal of Social Psychology; the British Journal of Social Psychology; and the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

Other Applied Journals: the International Journal of Conflict Management. Political Psychology.

If all our acts are conditioned behaviour, then so are our theories:
yet your behaviourist claims his is objectively true.
-- W. H. Auden

General Psychology

Resource Pages: the American Psychological Association page; the Canadian Psychological Association page; the Australian Psychological Society page.

Journals: the Psychological Bulletin; and the Psychological Review. The Annual Reviews of Psychology are also online - a fantastic resource.

Other links

Or: A slowly progressing attempt to organize my bookmarks and put them online

1. Critical Skills
   • Logical fallacies in psychology: 18 types at Kenneth S. Pope's Therapy, Ethics, Malpractice, Forensics, Critical Thinking (and a few other topics) site. Definitions and examples from psychology.
   • Philosophy Games at The Philosopher's Magazine. Neat logic puzzles including e.g. the Wason card sort task.
2. Some of my Social Psych Links
   • General / Classic
     • Classics in the History of Psychology by Christopher Green (York Psych dept). Brilliant collection of online articles; really love this site.
     • Course Resources on the Web - great site by Jon Mueller (Psychology, North Central College) with immense collection of materials & links for teaching social psychology.
     • Psychological Research on the Net. Links to online expts as well as links relevant to running online research - good stuff. Maintained by John Krantz (Hanover).
     • Psychology in the News page from APA - media watch and press releases.
     • The PsiCafe - extensive resource links site. First came across it when I was looking for online IQ tests - tonnes of research & teaching links & content. (Plus jokes, etc!)
   • Conformity and Influence
     • The Stanford Prison Experiment site. Overview of method & results, multimedia, discussion questions.
     • SPIDER, aka Social psychology information diffusion - educational resources. Cool site by maintained Alan Reifman (Human Devt and Family Studies, Michigan) providing links to sites for network models and network-related phenomena (fads, memes, etc.).
   • Decision-Making
     • Home page for Icek Aizen (Ajzen) (of TRA/TPB fame).
     • The Cochrane Collaboration (health care interventions site).
     • Map of Bounded Rationality, Daniel Kahneman's 2002 Nobel Prize lecture.
     • Self-efficacy scales at the Berlin Free University Health Psych unit. Maintained by G. S. Smith.
   • Prejudice
     • Understanding Prejudice. Written by S. Plous for McGraw-Hill but good general content.
     • Tolerance.org: A web project of the southern poverty law centre. Gratifying collection of info and activism tools.
     • The All Look the Same site - a test about whether people can identify differences between Korean, Chinese, and Japanese faces - with success rates reported at the end for people from different countries. Links to Asian diaspora cultural stuff.
   • Peace & Conflict (political science conflict guys), Conflict Resolution (org & politics), Conflict Management(business & political science)
     • Peace Psych links at socialpsychology.org.
     • Conflict data service at INCORE (a U of Ulster / UN U project for CR). "Our targeted audience includes: academics and others who are researching ethnic conflict, particularly those who live in conflict areas; policy makers, especially in the United Nations system; mediation practitioners in conflict areas; and the media. We offer information on a variety of conflicts in the world in the form of Country Guides."
     • The Peacemakers Speak at thecommunity.com (an activist site) - Nobel Laureates respond to Sept 11/2001 terrorist attacks.
     • The Solomon Asch Center for the study of ethnopolitical conflict (Psych / UPenn). Little content tho'.
   • Writing
     • D. J. Bem on Writing - classic articles on writing empirical & review papers.
     • The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing by Michael Harvey (Washington College) - thorough & detailed; content-oriented. A great teaching resource.
     • Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing by Miguel Roig (Office of Research Integrity, St. Johns U). Detailed, content-oriented.
   • Miscellaneous!
     • The Martin Seligman Research Alliance - promoting positive psych. Good resources for research, including summaries & scales, as well as teaching.
     • The Social Psychology of Aging, an e-book by Scott Madey (Dept of Psych, Shippensburg University).
     • A sociological social psychology - really enjoy this content by M. C. Kearl (Sociology & Anthropology, Trinity University) - good overview of relevant theoretical cross-over.
3. Neat Stats links
   • Some SPSS Macros you may find useful at Andrew Hayes' site (in the school of communication and journalism at Ohio State).
   • Data, Data, and more Data - a sampler of WWW resources for teaching statistics, created by R. Lock (Math dept, St. Lawrence U).
   • Home page of David Kenny.
   • Online Sobel Test and other goodies at Kristopher Preacher's site (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
   • Statistical tables calculator and other goodies at the VassarStats Web Site for Statistical Computation, by Richard Lowry.
   • Raynald's SPSS tools - v large set of scripts / syntax / macros.
   • Statistics for Psychology at the Encyclopedia of Psychology. Large set of annotated links, tho' not ordered.
4. Teaching in General
   • Teaching Large Classes project at TEDI (University of Qld Teaching and Educational Development Institute).

Knowing artists, you think you know all about Prima Donnas:
boy!, just wait till you hear scientists get up and sing.
-- W. H. Auden

Renaissance Woman by Night, Soc Psych Crusader by Day...

Research Interests

My academic interests are in the area of intergroup relations, identity and the self, and decision-making. I look at how groups interact with each other in various social systems, and how people's group membership influences their behaviours in the context of conflict.

I was granted a PhD in 2001, from McGill University in Canada. During my doctorate, I studied identity and decisions in conflict by looking at English/French relations in Québec, under the aegis of Donald M. Taylor. My research explored the way Anglophone and Francophone Québecers’ identity influenced their attitudes, intentions and behaviours. I focused on two processes: first, the way that identity changes “rational” cost-benefit analyses by creating contingencies of group- and individual-level costs and benefits; second, the way that group norms structure choices in conflict by influencing the evaluation of behavioural alternatives on dimensions of subjective expectancy and value. In my thesis work, I developed a model of agentic normative influence focusing on individuals’ deliberative engagement with both ingroup and outgroup norms for intergroup behaviours.

At this point, in 2002, I have an SSHRC post-doctoral research fellowship, which I have taken up at the Centre for Research on Group Processes, a research unit of the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia. Working with Debbie Terry, I have continued to study normative influence and identity processes in deliberative decision-making in conflict, contrasting this agentic model of norms and expectancy-value processes with the Referent Informational Influence model of norm-attitude-behaviour relationships developed by Terry and Hogg (e.g., 1996). Some of the studies I have recently conducted at UQ are described in working papers online here.

In addition to maintaining this brilliant program of ongoing basic research, I am interested in, and committed to, the translation of laboratory research into field studies and applied social psychological research. I have engaged the sociology and political science of collective action (e.g., social movement theories) in my own research program. I have been fortunate, in addition, to participate in several interdisciplinary field projects, concerning: (1) bilingualism for minority groups in Arctic Québec (Inuit children's second language learning and its impact on heritage language retention); (2) intergroup attitudes and immigration, in two projects at McGill (South African citizens’ attitudes to immigrants, migrant workers, and refugees) and the University of Queensland (a longitudinal survey of Queenslanders’ attitudes to asylum seekers); and (3) collective action, specifically attitudes and intentions with respect to political protest among anti-globalization demonstrators in Australia. I look forward to continuing this professionally interesting and personally satisfying engagement with applied topics, for example by studying real political, organizational or community groups and conflicts in the field.

Selected Refereed Journal Publications:

• Louis, W. R., & Taylor, D. M. (2002). Understanding the September 11th terrorist attack on America: The role of intergroup theories of normative influence. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2(1), 87-100.
• Louis, W. R., & Taylor, D. M. (2001). When the survival of a language is at stake: The future of Inuttitut in Arctic Québec. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 20, 111-143.
• Louis, W. R., & Taylor, D. M. (1999). From passive acceptance to social disruption: Towards an understanding of behavioural responses to discrimination. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 31(1): 19-28.

For further information about my academic career, please contact me here.

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Last officially modified October 2001. I created this page in August 1996, with help from the NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML.

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