Laura Wallace

We (Goizueta Business School) are hiring a new lab manager for our behavioral lab. This is a great opportunity for recent undergrads who are hoping to get more research experience before a PhD. Would love to see your strong undergrads in this applicant pool.

staff-emory.icims.com/jobs/150128/...

Introspective access to value-based multi-attribute choice processes - Nature Communications People routinely choose between multi-attribute options, such as which movie to watch. Here, the authors show people often have accurate insight into their choices, challenging the notion that people ...

Are we “strangers to ourselves”? Classic theories say people have limited insight into how they decide. Our new paper at @natcomms.nature.com challenges this view. With @rcarl.bsky.social sky.social, @hedykober.bsky.social y.social, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Anyone looking to take an amazing clinical psych student who would come to grad school with an NSF GRFP in hand? Interests in stigma, adversity, but flexible! (Side note that it is awful that nsf doesn’t let you defer, apply next yr w/grant in hand, and just count that as 1 of 2 deferral yrs)

The community of researchers I get to be a part of is one of my favorite parts of this career.

I'll be looking to build a community in Atlanta - please connect me if you know folks you think I'd be friends or collaborators with!

🌟 Exciting news! 🌟
This summer, one of my dreams is coming true: I’ll be joining Emory University - Goizueta Business School as an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management!

I'm so grateful for the wonderful mentors, collaborators, and friends who helped me make this happen.

Big congrats and welcome (back) to Chicago!!!

This looks fun - how does it work? You tell your students to swing by a coffee shop rather than have office hours?

Thomas Vaughn-Johnston led work on people who are dogmatically committed to neutrality (rather than extremity). psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Haha yes! Love it

We also identify people who are committed to having nuanced understanding of issues, and show that they are quite different than these neutrality ideologues.

We discuss implications for politically polarized attitudes, persuasion, intellectual humility, and our ability to address pressing issues

New work led by Thomas Vaughn-Johnston: 'The Preference for Neutrality.' Extremity is often seen as problematic, but some issues—like climate change—suffer from excessive neutrality. We created a scale to identify people dogmatically committed to neutrality, like others pursue extremity.

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YouTube video by DePaul Driehaus College of Business Expressing Ambivalence Hurts Likeability? Surprising Findings from Marketing Professor Geoff Durso

also have to relearn how to use social media. here's me connecting marketing principles with folks' sociopolitical ambivalence, and the social expectations versus reality about expressing that to others

Me!

Awesome - thanks! I applied :-)

In addition to research, I am passionate about mentoring and especially supporting mentees and colleagues from historically excluded groups. I’ve gotten to mentor some fabulous researchers through undergrad theses, and the SROP and Leadership Alliance summer programs.

Other work examines how we can get people to engage in difficult conversations and when, specifically, growth mindsets are beneficial.

How do perceptions of bias affect trust and persuasion? For example, my work finds that perceived bias can undermine trust and persuasion. However, perceived bias doesn’t always undermine persuasion – if biased sources switch positions, they can actually get a boost! psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-...

How do the ways that we talk about and understand history affect societal disadvantage and institutional trust? As one example, I explore how organizational history celebrations can undermine trust and belonging among Black Americans. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Here’s some more about the research questions I tackle. A thread:

Excited to share that I am officially on the academic job market! I’m currently a postdoc at UChicago Booth and did my graduate training in social psychology at Ohio State.
If you know of any opportunities or have advice, I’d love to connect!

Amazing! I’d love to be added as well!

Reminds me of some of Russ Fazio’s first work on how personal experience creates strong attitudes!

Shout out to co-first author @stephlreeves.bsky.social. Although we collaborated on this from the beginning, this started out as her dissertation work and she did a lot of the early heavy lifting on this project.

This work suggests that organizations may want to be careful about the ways that they talk about their histories; looking forward to future work on how organizations might be able to talk about their histories without these negative consequences, perhaps by acknowledging & making amends for racism.

Importantly, the negative effect of celebrating history vanishes when its clear that the organization has a history of having Black people in power, highlighting that this effect is specific to organizations that may have had a history of racism.

This occurs for fictional orgs about which people could not possess knowledge and absent information about prior marginalization or racial makeup; the cultural context of historical racism leads history celebrations to be threatening absent content about that specific history.

Many organizations have histories that marginalized Black Americans, a fact that Black Americans are particularly knowledgeable of. Therefore, when organizations celebrate their histories, it suggests that they are unaware of or condone this racist past.

These kinds of organizational history celebrations are quite common. Although this might serve motives to feel good about the organization or highlight its prestige, our work demonstrates that this undermines belonging + interest in joining among Black Americans

Imagine you encounter an organization celebrating it’s history in a relatively generic manner. “Our founder was amazing, we try to live up to the values he embodied when he built our company 75 years ago.” What inferences might you draw?