Research topic: social psychology

Olivier Corneille

My research interests went from mass-media violence to interpersonal perception, stereotyping, and inter-group relations. In mass-media research, I looked for conditions facilitating and inhibiting violent reactions. In interpersonal perception, I was interested in how people protected their ingroup (e.g., Black Sheep effect) and how implicit theories played a role in well-known biases such as the overattribution bias. I also investigated the advantages of adopting a confirmatory strategy in interviews. When studying stereotyping, I realized that a psychologizing implicit theories were too narrow an approach. Our team developed the theory of Social Judgeability. Recently, I have become interested in group-relations from a double perspective. First, starting from the ideas of essentialism and ethnocentrism, we have conducted several lines of research on infra-humanization. Second, depending upon the presence or absence of explicit racism, we are studying the advantages and disadvantages of adopting color-blind and color-conscious strategies when encountering members of an outgroup. If infra-humanization can be considered implicit racism, the latter two strategies can seen as norms of non-discrimination between groups, even though they are not necessarily used, in real life, as prescribed by their normative components.

My research is mainly concerned with social cognition, attribution, stereotyping, and intergroup relations. After my early work on the Black Sheep effect and the Ingroup Overexclusion effect, I developed an interest in stereotyping and more specifically in the formation and preservation of stereotypes as well as their suppression. The basic idea is that people rely on stereotypes not only for cognitive reasons (they face limited resources) but also for motivational (their stereotypes serve their own as well as their group's image) and social reasons (they believe their stereotypes are shared by their group members). More recently, I studied group perception, examining aspects of homogeneity, entitativity, and essentialism. I also initiated a program of research on social emotions in which we investigate whether, how, and why people experience emotions not because of events that occur to them personally, but because of events that affect members of groups to which they belong. Another of my interests is statistics and methods. I focused on the use of ANCOVA in personality and social research and issues of moderated mediation and mediated moderation.

Stéphanie Demoulin

My research is mostly concerned with social cognition and stereotyping. More specifically, I am studying how categorization affects people’s perception, judgment and memory. A classic outcome of categorization is the accentuation of perceived between-categories differences and within-categories resemblances. Stereotyping illustrates this process (e.g., “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”). In my recent research, I have examined category-based accentuations in the perception and memory of simple and complex stimuli, including faces. For instance, my colleagues and I have shown that people (mis)remember faces from different races and gender as more typical of their race and gender category than they really are. Other recent research interests deal with the study of automaticity in behaviors and in the processing of affective information. Research-unrelated interests include my family, readings, trips, and sports.