Russell Fazio is Harold E. Burtt Professor of
Social Psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the r ...
at
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...
, where he heads Russ's Attitude and Social Cognition Lab (RASCL).
[Fazio, R. H. "Russ' Attitude and Social Cognition Lab page." http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/rascl/Lab.htm Retrieved May 26, 2014] Fazio's work focuses on social psychological phenomena like
attitude
Attitude may refer to:
Philosophy and psychology
* Attitude (psychology), an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value
* Metaphysics of presence
* Propositional attitude, a relational mental state connecting a person to a pro ...
formation and change, the relationship between attitudes and behavior, and the automatic and controlled
cognitive processes that guide social behavior.
Education and academic career
Russell Fazio received his Bachelor of Arts from
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
in 1974, where he graduated
summa cum laude and was a member of
Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...
.
He then attended graduate school at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
, receiving his Master of Arts in 1976 followed by his Doctor of Philosophy in
social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the r ...
in 1978.
In 1978, Fazio became an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University and in 1981, he became an associate professor at the same institution. In 1985, he became a professor of psychology and cognitive science, still at
Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
*Indiana Universi ...
. He was a visiting professor at the
University of Exeter
The University of Exeter is a public university , public research university in Exeter, Devon, England, United Kingdom. Its predecessor institutions, St Luke's College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of Min ...
in 1997. In 2001, he moved to
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...
, becoming a distinguished professor of social and behavioral sciences in the Department of Psychology. Since 2002, Fazio has been at Ohio State University as the Harold E. Burtt Chair in Psychology. He also runs a lab called RASCL (Russ’ Attitude and Social Cognition Lab) at Ohio State.
Research
Attitude formation
Fazio proposed that people developed attitudes toward novel objects through exploration. An exploratory behavior refers to a novel response when a learner tries to discover which actions produce which outcomes in order to achieve rewards or avoid punishment.
[Fazio, R. H., Eiser, J. R., & Shook, N. J. (2004). Attitude formation through exploration: Valence asymmetries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 293-311.] Fazio et al., designed a novel bean game, in which some beans had associated positive values and some had negative values. Participants must decide whether to eat the bean or avoid it. They found out that subjects had learned the valence of outcomes to be expected for various types of beans during exploration and formed attitudes would generalize to other novel stimuli. Subjects showed better learning for negative beans than for positive beans and then these negative attitudes had a greater effect on generalization. Fazio referred it as "valence asymmetries”.
Fazio also conducted research on implicit attitude formation via classical conditioning. In the evaluation task after subjects were exposed to multiple valenced unconditioned stimulus (US) and novel neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) pairs, subjects rated more positively for the CS paired with positive items than for the CS paired with negative items. Subjects were unaware of pairings.
Implicit Association Test
The implicit-association test (IAT) is a controversial assessment intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes hel ...
(IAT) was used to support this result as well. In the IAT, four categories were pleasant and unpleasant items, positive conditioned stimuli and negative conditioned stimuli. Subjects easily associated pleasant items with positive conditioned stimuli and easily associated negative items with negative conditioned stimuli and they found that responding to incompatible pairs was harder. Evidence altogether suggested that attitudes can be conditioned without awareness.
Affective priming and automatic attitudes
There has been a long dispute between Fazio and
John Bargh
John A. Bargh (; born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious proc ...
about under what conditions automatic attitudes are activated. In Bargh's opinion (1992), automatic attitudes activation is a general and pervasive phenomenon. Most evaluations stored in memories are activated automatically on the mere presence of the social or nonsocial object. However, Fazio thinks that automatic attitudes activation varies as a function of the strength of object-evaluation association. Fazio did experiments using sequential priming procedure to support his position.
David E. Meyer and
Roger W. Schvaneveldt laid the groundwork for Fazio's work on affective
priming
Priming may refer to:
* Priming (agriculture), a form of seed planting preparation, in which seeds are soaked before planting
* Priming (immunology), a process occurring when a specific antigen is presented to naive lymphocytes causing them to d ...
in 1971 with the development of the
lexical decision task The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.
Although versions of the task had been used ...
. The findings of their experiments indicated that lexical decisions for concepts associated with a
prime
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...
were facilitated by exposure to the prime (i.e., the presentation of the word “doctor” as a prime facilitated identifying the word “nurse”). These findings and others suggested that concepts associated with a prime are automatically activated from memory up on presentation of the prime, and so the prime acts to facilitate responding to semantically related target words.
In a 1986 paper, Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes expanded the research on automatic activation to attitudes, reasoning that a similar priming effect should be found. To test the idea,
attitude objects were used as primes, with evaluative adjectives used as target words. Participants were primed with attitude objects and were instructed to indicate whether the target word they saw meant “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible.
[Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50''(2), 229-238.][Fazio, R. H. (2001). On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview. ''Cognition & Emotion, 15''(2), 115-141. http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/faculty/fazio/reprints_pdf/cogemo.pdf] The focus of these experiments was on the latency of the judgment and to what extent the judgment was facilitated by the presentation of an attitude object as a prime.
In three experiments, Fazio and his colleagues found evidence for automatic attitude activation, as well as evidence for facilitation.
Participant responding was faster on trials where the primed attitude objects matched the connotation of the target words: for example, if participants were primed with the attitude object “cockroach”, they were quicker to identify a negative target word (i.e., “disgusting”) as negative, but were slower to identify a positive target word (e.g., “appealing”) as positive. Participants were faster to identify positive word when attitude objects were positive, and faster to identify negative words when the attitude objects were negative.
Bona-fide pipeline
The bona fide pipeline is a method used to obtain affect and attitude towards various objects or ideas. Fazio's work on the bona fide pipeline expanded on the
bogus pipeline The bogus pipeline is a fake polygraph used to get participants to truthfully respond to emotional/affective questions in the survey. It is a technique used by social psychologists to reduce false answers when attempting to collect self-report data. ...
. The bogus pipeline is a method where a subject is told that the researchers will be recording their physiological responses and through those responses, will be able to tell if the subject is lying. The subject is able to be convinced of this because the researchers are manipulating the device from another room, based upon information the subject has given them at an earlier time.
This method is similar to a lie detector test. Both the bogus and the bona fide pipelines attempt to measure attitudes without having to deal with the influences of
social desirability
In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others. It can take the form of over-reporting "good behavi ...
. Social desirability is when a respondent answers questions so that they will be seen favorably by others.
The bona fide pipeline started as a way to measure how attitudes are activated from memory, then Fazio began testing ways to use the bona fide pipeline to measure racial attitudes. The procedure involves priming, then assessment of a target stimulus, often by pressing one of two buttons on a keyboard. The prime is a word or a picture presented directly before the target. If the subject has the same attitude towards the prime and target, they will be able to categorize the target more quickly. This is called facilitation. If the subject has conflicting attitudes towards the prime and the target, their response time will be slower. An example of facilitation is when a subject who is negatively biased towards African-Americans is able to more quickly categorize negative words as “bad” after being shown a picture of an African-American face.
Fazio used the
Modern Racism Scale as an explicit measure of racial biases in his experiments. The validity of Modern Racism Scale as measure of racial attitudes was called into question by the Bona Fide Pipeline results. Subjects who showed less bias on the Modern Racism Scale exhibited more negativity towards Blacks in Fazio's measures. Fazio tested the reactivity of Modern Racism Scale by conducting an experiment where race of the experimenter and whether or not the subject thought the experimenter would see their scores were manipulated. Subjects showed less negative bias towards Blacks on the Modern Racism Scale when they knew their scores would be seen, and their scores dropped even more when the experimenter was Black.
The Bona Fide Pipeline results may not have correlated with the Modern Racism Scale, but they were found to correlate with the Black experimenter's ratings of subject friendliness and interest.
The implications of Fazio's results in his Bona Fide Pipeline experiments are that racial biases are often unconscious or implicit. Fazio concluded that these biases are automatically activated from memory, which means they will relate more to personal experiences than a stereotype. He also proposed that reactivity is to blame for the lack of correlation between the Modern Racism Scale and his own unobtrusive measures. Fazio suggested that the Modern Racism Scale measures one's willingness to express prejudice, rather than one's actual biases.
The relationships between attitude and behaviors
In early 1980s, Fazio et al., examined the relationship between attitude accessibility and the manner of attitude formation. The experiment results suggested that “subjects could respond more quickly in a response-time task to inquires about their attitudes when the attitudes were based upon direct behavioral experience with the attitude objects”(Fazio et al., 1981). The results supported that behavioral experience could facilitate for attitude formation and increase attitude accessibilities.
In 1986, Fazio and his colleagues proposed a model of the attitude-to-behavior process. In this model, behaviors stem from individuals’ perceptions of an attitude object and a situation in which the attitude object is encountered. The degree to which people's attitudes guide their subsequent perceptions of and behavior towards the attitude object is moderated by attitude accessibility.
[Fazio, R. H., & Williams, C. J. (1986). Attitude accessibility as a moderator of the attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relations: An investigation of the 1984 presidential election. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 505-514.] Fazio and Williams conducted an investigation on the 1984 presidential election. The accessibility of attitudes towards two candidates, Reagan and Mondale, was indicated by the latency of responses towards attitudinal inquiries. Subjects, who responded faster, showed greater selective perception and greater attitude and voting-behavior consistency.
Awards
* 2010 – Donald T. Campbell Award for distinguished scientific contributions to social psychology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
* 2008 – Distinguished Scholar Award, Ohio State University
* 2006 – Thomas M. Ostrom Award for outstanding lifetime contributions to social cognition theory and research, Person Memory Interest Group
* 2004 – OSU Department of Psychology Fred Brown Research Award
* 1999–2003 –
NIMH NIMH may refer to:
*Nickel–metal hydride battery (NiMH), a type of electrical battery
*National Institute of Mental Health, an agency of the United States government
*National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a professional organisation in the Un ...
Senior Scientist Award
* 1992–1997 –
NIMH NIMH may refer to:
*Nickel–metal hydride battery (NiMH), a type of electrical battery
*National Institute of Mental Health, an agency of the United States government
*National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a professional organisation in the Un ...
Research Scientist Development Award
* 1987 –
NIMH NIMH may refer to:
*Nickel–metal hydride battery (NiMH), a type of electrical battery
*National Institute of Mental Health, an agency of the United States government
*National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a professional organisation in the Un ...
MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) Award
* 1987–1992 –
NIMH NIMH may refer to:
*Nickel–metal hydride battery (NiMH), a type of electrical battery
*National Institute of Mental Health, an agency of the United States government
*National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a professional organisation in the Un ...
Research Scientist Development Award
* 1983 –
APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution
Service activities
Fazio has been a member of these organizations:
*
APA Division 8 Publications Committee (Member, 1985–1987, chair, 1988)
*
NIMH NIMH may refer to:
*Nickel–metal hydride battery (NiMH), a type of electrical battery
*National Institute of Mental Health, an agency of the United States government
*National Institute of Medical Herbalists, a professional organisation in the Un ...
Mental Health Behavioral Sciences Research Review Committee, 1988–92
* Committee on Science Initiatives, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 1990–92
* NIMH Workshop on Integrating Social Psychological Theory in AIDS Research, 1994
* National Science Foundation Workshop on Global Change, 1994
* Fellows Committee, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 1996–98
* NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Review Integration Panel, 1998
* APA Early Career Award Selection Panel, 2000
* Executive Committee,
Society of Experimental Social Psychology The Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) is a scientific organization of social scientists founded in 1965 with the goal of advancing and communicating theories in social psychology. Its first chairperson was Edwin P. Hollander.Holland ...
, 2002–05
* Membership Committee (chair), Society of Experimental Social Psychology, 2003–05
* Ostrom Award Selection Committee, Person Memory Interest Group, 2007–08
* Campbell Award Selection Committee, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2011
* President-Elect, Midwestern Psychological Association, 2011–12
* President, Midwestern Psychological Association, 2012–13
* Past President, Midwestern Psychological Association, 2013–14
* Diener Award in Social Psychology Panel, Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Member, 2012; chair, 2013)
* Early Career Award Selection Committee, International Social Cognition Network, 2015
[
Retrieved February 2, 2017, from Harold E. Burtt Professor of Psychology Web site: http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/fazio/professional-service.php]
Selected publications
Books
* Petty, R. E., Fazio, R. H., & Brinol, P. (Eds.). (2009). ''Attitudes: Insights from the new implicit measures.'' New York: Psychology Press.
* Fazio, R. H. & Petty, R. E. (2007). ''Attitudes: Their structure, function and consequences (v. 1).'' Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
Selected journal articles
* Jones, C. R., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2010). Evaluative conditioning: The “How” question. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 43, pp. 205–255). San Diego: Academic Press.
* Han, H. A., Czellar, S., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2010). Malleability of attitudes or malleability of the IAT? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 286–298.
* Jones, C. R., Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2009). Implicit misattribution as a mechanism underlying evaluative conditioning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 933–948.
* Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2009). Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995–998.
* Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2008). Interracial roommate relationships: An experimental field test of the contact hypothesis. Psychological Science, 19, 717–723.
* Fazio, R. H. & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition: Their meaning and use. ''Annual Review of Psychology, 54'', 297–327.
* Fazio, R. H. (2001). On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview. ''Cognition & Emotion, 15''(2), 115–141.
* Dunton, B. C. & Fazio R. H. (1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. ''Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23''(3), 316–326.
* Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial-attitudes – A bona-fide pipeline. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69''(6), 1031–1027.
* Fazio, R. H. (1990). Multiple processes by which attitudes guide behavior – The mode model as an integrative framework. ''Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23'', 74–109.
* Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50''(2), 229–238.
* Fazio, R. H. & Williams, C. J. (1986). Attitude accessibility as a moderator of the attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relations – An investigation of the 1984 presidential-election. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51''(3), 505–514.
* Cooper, J. & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance theory. ''Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 17'', 229–226.
* Fazio, R. H., Chen, J. & McDonel, E. C. & Sherman, S. J. (1982). Attitude accessibility, attitude behavior consistency, and the strength of the object evaluation association. ''Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18''(4), 339–357.
* Darley, J. M. & Fazio, R. H. (1980). Expectancy confirmation processes arising in the social interaction sequence. ''American Psychologist, 35''(10), 867–881.
See also
*
Priming
Priming may refer to:
* Priming (agriculture), a form of seed planting preparation, in which seeds are soaked before planting
* Priming (immunology), a process occurring when a specific antigen is presented to naive lymphocytes causing them to d ...
*
Implicit cognition
Implicit cognition refers to unconscious influences such as knowledge, perception, or memory, that influence a person's behavior, even though they themselves have no conscious awareness whatsoever of those influences.
Overview
Implicit cognition i ...
*
Social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interacti ...
References
External links
Ohio_State_University_Page.html" ;"title="Ohio State University">Ohio State University
Page">Ohio State University">Ohio State University
Page
Russ' Attitude and Social Cognition Lab pageRussell Fazio, Ohio State University Psychology Department Faculty PageRussell Fazio, Social Psychology Network page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fazio, Russell H.
1952 births
People from Utica, New York
Cornell University alumni
Princeton University alumni
Indiana University faculty
American psychologists
Ohio State University faculty
Living people