There are currently several core faculty members and a number of affiliated faculty. As a group, our faculty have written or edited more than two dozen books and 500 scholarly articles and chapters.
Core Faculty
Jennifer Crocker
Professor; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979. Research interests include the self and self-esteem, including the costs of pursuing self-esteem as a goal; the intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences of self-image and compassionate goals for relationships, psychological well-being and social beliefs; and getting over the self through self-affirmation and self-transcendence. 122 Lazenby Hall; 292-0985; crocker.37@osu.edu
Riana Brown (Arriving January 2025)
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., New York University, 2023. Research focuses broadly on how people respond to social problems (e.g., social inequality, climate change). She is interested in understanding the ways people seek to address and mitigate social problems and social injustices and the many psychological barriers in addressing them; brown.9677@osu.edu
Russell H. Fazio
Harold E. Burtt Chair in Psychology; Ph.D., 1978, Princeton University. Research focuses upon attitudes, their formation, accessibility from memory, functional value, and the processes by which they influence attention, categorization, judgment, and behavior. Current research concerns (a) the interplay between automatic and controlled processes in determining judgments and behavior, (b) implicit measures of attitude, (c) evaluative conditioning, (d) valence asymmetries in attitude formation and generalization, and (e) the implications of these matters for the treatment and assessment of emotional disorders. 100C Lazenby Hall; 688-5408; fazio.11@osu.edu
Kentaro Fujita
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., New York University, 2006. Research examines how motivation and cognition interact in judgment, decision-making, and action, particularly in the context of self-regulation and goal-pursuit. Current research examines how motivation impacts people’s cognitive processing, and how cognitive processes impact the expression of various motivations. 128 Lazenby Hall, 247-2751, fujita.5@osu.edu
Lisa Libby
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Cornell University, 2003. Research focuses on the role of perspective in self and social judgment, emotion, and behavior. Research explores the implications of these effects for personal identity, decision-making, motivation, well-being, and intergroup relations. 126 Lazenby Hall; 247-8376; libby.10@osu.edu
Ellen Peters
Professor; Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1998. Her research focuses on how affective, intuitive, and deliberative processes help people to make decisions in an increasingly complex world. Recent research has focused on numeracy, affect/emotion, and issues in health and environmental decision making. peters.498@osu.edu
Richard E. Petty
Distinguished University Professor; Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 1977. Research focuses on the situational and individual difference factors responsible for changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors with particular emphasis on understanding prejudice, consumer choices, political and legal decisions, health behaviors, and understanding implicit (unconscious) factors in persuasion and resistance to change; the effect of racial and ethnic prejudice. 100E Lazenby Hall; 292-1640; petty.1@osu.edu
Steven Spencer
Professor; PhD, University of Michigan. Research focuses on motivation and the self, particularly on how these factors affect stereotyping and prejudice. In examining motivation and the self, he also examines how implicit processes that are outside of people's awareness affect people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In examining stereotyping and prejudice, he studies how threats to the self-concept can lead to stereotyping and prejudice, and how this stereotyping and prejudice affects subsequent feelings about the self. He also examines how being a member of a stereotyped group affects people's self-concept and academic performance. 100 A/B Lazenby Hall; 292-2726; spencer.670@osu.edu
Dylan Wagner
Assistant Professor; Dylan received his B.A. in Psychology from McGill University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Dartmouth College. Research in his lab focuses on two separate domains. One is aimed at understanding how our knowledge of other people (their likes and dislikes, their personalities, their quirks and habits) is organized into a coherent impression and, in turn, how this impression is encoded in the brain. Using a combination of fucntional neuroimaging, machine learning techniques and popular media (e.g., films, television), this line of work aims at developing methods to gain access to how individuals think and feel about the people around them. 140H Lazenby Hall; 688-1738; wagner.1174@osu.edu
Baldwin M. Way
Assistant Professor; Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. Research examines the role of social relationships on health. Psychological, neuroimaging, pharmacological, and genetic approaches are used to examine the nature of social bonds and the means by which they affect downstream health relevant pathways such as the immune system. Particular focus on rejection, aggression, and social support. 110G Lazenby Hall; 292-3348; way.37@osu.edu
Duane T. Wegener
Professor, Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 1994. Research addresses social information processing in attitude change, impression formation, and decision making. Research also addresses the resulting biases in judgments and attempts to avoid or remove those biases. This research helps to inform understanding of the human side of social problems such as prejudice, health, and energy consumption. 100H Lazenby Hall; 292-1866; wegener.1@osu.edu
Emeritus Faculty
Marilynn Brewer
Emeritus Faculty, Ph.D., Northwester University, 1968. Research interests include (1) social cognition, the perception and cognitive representation of individual persons and person "types;" (2) intergroup relations, especially the study of ingroup biases and the effects of contact between groups on intergroup acceptance; and (3) social identities and the self-concept. brewer.64@osu.edu
Gifford Weary
Emeritus Faculty, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 1977. Research interests include conscious and unconscious cognitive (e.g., chronic and temporary outcome expectancies) and motivational (e.g., control deprivation) influences on social perception and inference processes, social cognitive effects of implicit and explicit goal activation, motivational influences on stereotyping, and personality processes. An additional focus of Dr. Weary’s research entails the role of chronic and temporary affective states (e.g., depression) in social information processing. 108 Lazenby Hall; 292-7689; weary.1@osu.edu