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Michael Olson

Research statement

Most of my research involves the overlapping areas of attitude formation and change, implicit social cognition, racial prejudice, and intergroup relations.  With respect to attitude formation and change, we have recently developed a conditioning paradigm that allows us to study how people come to evaluate objects in their environment either positively or negatively without their conscious awareness.  We’ve already demonstrated that attitudes can develop without such awareness (that is, subliminal persuasion) and we’re currently addressing questions regarding when evaluative conditioning occurs: for which kinds of people, and under what boundary conditions.  We’re also using the paradigm to help illuminate how racial prejudice might develop – and even be reduced - through an evaluative conditioning procedure.  In related work, we attempt to uncover pre-existing automatic (and unconscious) information in the mind using procedures that have the potential to uncover a person’s feelings and beliefs without having to ask the person explicitly.  These “implicit measures” include sequential priming, the Implicit Association Test, and several older techniques like the Thematic Apperception Test.  We’re currently trying to better understand just what it is that these measures are getting at, as well as how the measures relate to one another.  Finally, our lab has a long-standing interest in racial prejudice, and we address basic questions about how prejudice develops, how it is detected, and how it manifests in behavior using some of the approaches mentioned above.  We often examine the interaction between automatic information and more thoughtful, deliberate cognitions on race-related judgments and behaviors.  Most recently, we’ve developed a paradigm that allows us to study one-on-one interactions between members of different groups.  Using this paradigm, we’re investigating how racial attitudes, motivation to control prejudiced reactions, and contextual factors affect verbal and nonverbal behavior in interactions between Blacks and Whites.

Honors

  • Editorial Board, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007-)
  • Editorial Board, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2007-)
  • Fazio & Olson (2003) Annual Review of Psychology article identified as a “Fast Breaking Paper” in Psychology/Psychiatry (ISI Essential Science Indicators citation analysis, April 2004)

Grants

  • UTK Chancellor's Award in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Selected Publications

Han, H. A., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2006). The influence of experimentally-created extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 259-272.

Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2006). Reducing automatically-activated racial prejudice through implicit evaluative conditioning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 421-433.

Miller, S. M., Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2004). Perceived reactions to romantic relationships: When Race is Used as a Cue to Status. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 7, 354-369.

Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2004). Trait inferences as a function of automatically-activated racial attitudes and motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1-12.

Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2004). Reducing the influence of extra-personal associations on the Implicit Association Test: Personalizing the IAT. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 653-667.

Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.

Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2003). Relations between implicit measures of prejudice: What are we measuring? Psychological Science, 14, 36-39.

Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2001). Implicit attitude formation through classical conditioning. Psychological Science, 12, 413-417.

Michael Olson

Michael Olson

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Indiana University (2003)

Email: molson2@utk.edu
Web site: http://web.utk.edu/~molson2/
Phone: 865-974-8264

Key words: Social Psychology, attitude change, social cognition