Research Overview
Dr. Kate A. Ratliff is the director of the Attitudes and Social Cognition (ASC) Lab at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) 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.
Migration and Regional Bias
Millions of people migrate each year. Does moving from one place to another change people’s individual-level intergroup attitudes? Do regional-level intergroup attitudes change as people move in and out of a geographic area? Yes! We currently have two lines of research testing these questions. First, we propose that people assimilate and reflect the prevailing norms and attitudes of the place in which they live. Thus, when people move, their intergroup attitudes should shift to become more in line with those of their new location and less in line with those of their previous location. We have demonstrated this effect in the context of racial bias. People moving to Alachua County Florida (a county in Florida with relatively low levels of pro-White/anti-Black intergroup bias) showed a time-dependent bias reduction, with longer time spent in Gainesville associated with decreased levels of bias. Second, we propose that migration patterns can influence regional bias. Using county-to-county migration data from the U.S. census and county-level racial attitude estimates from Project Implicit, we examined the impact of people relocating from one U.S. county to another on racial attitudes in their new county. Consistent with our prediction, the bias brought by the migrants positively predicts county-level racial bias after migration, even after controlling for county-level racial bias before migration. These studies highlight the significant role of migration in spreading and shaping both individual and regional intergroup attitudes.
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).
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.
Migration and Regional Bias
Millions of people migrate each year. Does moving from one place to another change people’s individual-level intergroup attitudes? Do regional-level intergroup attitudes change as people move in and out of a geographic area? Yes! We currently have two lines of research testing these questions. First, we propose that people assimilate and reflect the prevailing norms and attitudes of the place in which they live. Thus, when people move, their intergroup attitudes should shift to become more in line with those of their new location and less in line with those of their previous location. We have demonstrated this effect in the context of racial bias. People moving to Alachua County Florida (a county in Florida with relatively low levels of pro-White/anti-Black intergroup bias) showed a time-dependent bias reduction, with longer time spent in Gainesville associated with decreased levels of bias. Second, we propose that migration patterns can influence regional bias. Using county-to-county migration data from the U.S. census and county-level racial attitude estimates from Project Implicit, we examined the impact of people relocating from one U.S. county to another on racial attitudes in their new county. Consistent with our prediction, the bias brought by the migrants positively predicts county-level racial bias after migration, even after controlling for county-level racial bias before migration. These studies highlight the significant role of migration in spreading and shaping both individual and regional intergroup attitudes.
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).
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.