David Hamilton (psychologist)

David Lewis Hamilton (born in 1941) is an American social psychologist and researcher currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1]

Education and academic career

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David received his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and his master's degree from the University of Richmond.[2] He received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Illinois under supervision by Ivan Steiner and then was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University for 8 years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976.[3] His focus shifted from trying to understand personality to trying to understand how people perceive personality.[4]

Research

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His research focuses on the perception of people and groups and how processes related to these perceptions affect Stereotype formation and use. He has produced a lot of research that has contributed to our understanding of psychology, with two major ones listed below:

Illusory correlation: He found that processing biases could produce false judgements of correlations between two things that were not related.[5] He found that illusory correlations form when small groups become associated with infrequent behaviour even when the behaviour frequency did not differ between other groups.[6] This idea was very important in Social cognition.

Perceived Entitativity: His research has shown that perceived coherence in groups or people has important consequences for judgements of those entities.[5]

Awards

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Selected Publications

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Articles

  • Chen, Jacqueline M.; Pauker, Kristin; Gaither, Sarah E.; Hamilton, David L.; Sherman, Jeffrey W. (2018-09-01). "Black + White = Not White: A minority bias in categorizations of Black-White multiracials". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 78: 43–54. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2018.05.002. ISSN 0022-1031. S2CID 52263820.

Books

References

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