Research Overview
Dr. Kate A. Ratliff is the director of the Attitudes and Social Cognition (ASC) Lab at the University of Florida and recent past executive director and current board member of Project Implicit, a non-profit with the goal to educate the public about bias, to develop methodological tools to measure bias, and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet.
Manuscript reprints and data are available at my home page on the Open Science Framework. My vita is available here.
Manuscript reprints and data are available at my home page on the Open Science Framework. My vita is available here.
Incomplete List of Ongoing Lab Projects
Institutional Change and Intergroup Bias
Individual opinions about controversial topics vary widely and do not always match the policies and laws that govern the issue. How do critical moments that define policies and laws affect individuals’ attitudes? Do moments of institutional change cause more extreme attitudes? Do moments that reinforce the status quo lead to more entrenched attitudes? I recently received funding from the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Jackie Chen (University of Connecticut), to examine changes in U.S. Americans’ gender attitudes following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a highly anticipated case on reproductive health that has direct implications for state laws. In this work we will conduct two months-long studies, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal, assessing gender attitudes before and after the Supreme Court’s decision on this landmark abortion case. The studies also account for geographic variations in policy implementation. Additionally, this project examines specific conditions and mechanisms that influence attitudinal response to changes in state laws and policies: (1) the perceived legitimacy of state and federal policy-making bodies, (2) the gender norms they perceive among others in general and others close to them, (3) their pre-existing support for reproductive rights policy, and (4) their belief that reproductive rights policy is a gender-relevant issue. Understanding how policies influence opinions provides insight into the relationship between institutions and individuals in a democratic society.
Defensive Responding to Feedback about Implicit Bias
Because egalitarianism is a cherished self-view for most Americans, learning that one harbors implicit biases is threatening to the self, prompting defensive responding. My lab has investigated people’s lay beliefs about culpability for implicit bias (Redford & Ratliff, 2016) and the role of implicit-explicit attitude discrepancy in defensive reactions to feedback about bias. We find that people respond most defensively to feedback about implicit bias when: (a) implicit and explicit attitudes are more discrepant than congruent, and (b) implicit attitudes align with societal bias (e.g., a preference for straight people relative to gay people rather than the reverse). Greater defensiveness, in turn, predicts lower intentions to engage in future egalitarian behavior. This initial finding has led to several further tests of boundary conditions and moderators of the feedback-defensiveness link (Howell & Ratliff, 2017) and an investigation into whether majority and minority group members similarly respond to feedback about bias (Howell, Gaither, & Ratliff, 2016).
Development and Evaluation of an Online Bias Education Program
I worked in collaboration with Carlee Beth Hawkins, Emily Umansky, and Nicole Lofaro to develop and evaluate a brief, self-paced, interactive online educational program called Understanding Implicit Bias that has undergone widespread efficacy testing at two universities. Compared to the control group, students in the intervention group showed increased objective and subjective knowledge, awareness of bias, and feelings of responsibility for mitigating the impact of bias. It is estimated that companies spend $8 billion a year on DEI training programs. In this work, currently under review, we show a brief, online educational effort can have motivational and educational effects that are equal in magnitude to some (very expensive) programs that require hours or days to implement. We intend to make this program freely available, balancing the burden of time and money so that organizational resources can instead be used to implement more intensive, impactful diversity initiatives that build on such educational efforts.
Attitude Transfer Effects in Impression Formation
My most longstanding line of research is on attitude transfer—the process by which evaluations of one stimulus (e.g., an individual group member) influence evaluations of other stimuli that are related (e.g., others from the same group). The most general finding from my lab is that evaluations of group members spontaneously generalize to others in the same group as assessed by indirect, behavioral measures of evaluations, but that self-reported attitudes do not generalize because people deliberately avoid using information about one group member to judge another group member (Ratliff & Nosek, 2008; Ratliff & Nosek, 2011; Ratliff et al., 2012). I also investigate the mechanisms, boundary conditions, and real-world applications of these attitude generalization effects (Chen & Ratliff, 2016; Ratliff & Nosek, 2011; Hawkins & Ratliff, 2015). Currently, I am exploring: (a) individual differences in attitude transfer, (b) the role of perceived group member similarity in attitude transfer, and (c) the influence of associative and propositional information on attitude transfer. I summarize this line of work in a forthcoming invited chapter (Ratliff, 2022) that will be published in the Handbook of Impression Formation (Balcetis & Moskowitz, eds.).
Other Topics
If you're really curious, you can see our lab project tracking worksheet.
Individual opinions about controversial topics vary widely and do not always match the policies and laws that govern the issue. How do critical moments that define policies and laws affect individuals’ attitudes? Do moments of institutional change cause more extreme attitudes? Do moments that reinforce the status quo lead to more entrenched attitudes? I recently received funding from the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Jackie Chen (University of Connecticut), to examine changes in U.S. Americans’ gender attitudes following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a highly anticipated case on reproductive health that has direct implications for state laws. In this work we will conduct two months-long studies, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal, assessing gender attitudes before and after the Supreme Court’s decision on this landmark abortion case. The studies also account for geographic variations in policy implementation. Additionally, this project examines specific conditions and mechanisms that influence attitudinal response to changes in state laws and policies: (1) the perceived legitimacy of state and federal policy-making bodies, (2) the gender norms they perceive among others in general and others close to them, (3) their pre-existing support for reproductive rights policy, and (4) their belief that reproductive rights policy is a gender-relevant issue. Understanding how policies influence opinions provides insight into the relationship between institutions and individuals in a democratic society.
Defensive Responding to Feedback about Implicit Bias
Because egalitarianism is a cherished self-view for most Americans, learning that one harbors implicit biases is threatening to the self, prompting defensive responding. My lab has investigated people’s lay beliefs about culpability for implicit bias (Redford & Ratliff, 2016) and the role of implicit-explicit attitude discrepancy in defensive reactions to feedback about bias. We find that people respond most defensively to feedback about implicit bias when: (a) implicit and explicit attitudes are more discrepant than congruent, and (b) implicit attitudes align with societal bias (e.g., a preference for straight people relative to gay people rather than the reverse). Greater defensiveness, in turn, predicts lower intentions to engage in future egalitarian behavior. This initial finding has led to several further tests of boundary conditions and moderators of the feedback-defensiveness link (Howell & Ratliff, 2017) and an investigation into whether majority and minority group members similarly respond to feedback about bias (Howell, Gaither, & Ratliff, 2016).
Development and Evaluation of an Online Bias Education Program
I worked in collaboration with Carlee Beth Hawkins, Emily Umansky, and Nicole Lofaro to develop and evaluate a brief, self-paced, interactive online educational program called Understanding Implicit Bias that has undergone widespread efficacy testing at two universities. Compared to the control group, students in the intervention group showed increased objective and subjective knowledge, awareness of bias, and feelings of responsibility for mitigating the impact of bias. It is estimated that companies spend $8 billion a year on DEI training programs. In this work, currently under review, we show a brief, online educational effort can have motivational and educational effects that are equal in magnitude to some (very expensive) programs that require hours or days to implement. We intend to make this program freely available, balancing the burden of time and money so that organizational resources can instead be used to implement more intensive, impactful diversity initiatives that build on such educational efforts.
Attitude Transfer Effects in Impression Formation
My most longstanding line of research is on attitude transfer—the process by which evaluations of one stimulus (e.g., an individual group member) influence evaluations of other stimuli that are related (e.g., others from the same group). The most general finding from my lab is that evaluations of group members spontaneously generalize to others in the same group as assessed by indirect, behavioral measures of evaluations, but that self-reported attitudes do not generalize because people deliberately avoid using information about one group member to judge another group member (Ratliff & Nosek, 2008; Ratliff & Nosek, 2011; Ratliff et al., 2012). I also investigate the mechanisms, boundary conditions, and real-world applications of these attitude generalization effects (Chen & Ratliff, 2016; Ratliff & Nosek, 2011; Hawkins & Ratliff, 2015). Currently, I am exploring: (a) individual differences in attitude transfer, (b) the role of perceived group member similarity in attitude transfer, and (c) the influence of associative and propositional information on attitude transfer. I summarize this line of work in a forthcoming invited chapter (Ratliff, 2022) that will be published in the Handbook of Impression Formation (Balcetis & Moskowitz, eds.).
Other Topics
If you're really curious, you can see our lab project tracking worksheet.