Eliot Smith

Home Website
Social Pyschology Page
Socially Situated Cognition Lab
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Field of study

Connectionist models of social judgment and social behavior; implications of situated/embodied cognition for social psychology

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University, 1975
B.S., magna cum laude, Harvard College, 1971

Research interests

Role of intergroup emotions (emotions experienced with respect to one's collective self as a group member) in prejudice and intergroup relations
New conceptualizations of cognition as situated and embodied and their implications for social cognition
Connectionist or neural network models in social psychology
Social cognition in general, particularly the nature of mental representations of persons and groups and their effects on social judgments, including person perception and stereotyping.
Much of my research examines the ways people perceive members of their own and other social groups, evaluate them positively or negatively, and behave toward them. In particular, recent research (in collaboration with Diane Mackie of the University of California, Santa Barbara) has focused on the role of emotions in prejudice and intergroup behavior. The core insight of social identity theory and related viewpoints such as self-categorization theory is that an important social group membership becomes part of a person's self. This assumption means that, like any aspect of the self, group membership takes on motivational and affective significance. A new theory of intergroup emotions arises from combining this assumption with appraisal theories of emotion. In this theory, prejudice involves emotional reactions to an out-group based on appraisals of its relationship to the in-group (such as threat). In turn, these group-based emotions may lead to discriminatory behaviors toward the out-group. Aspects of this new theory have been tested and confirmed in several studies.

Representative publications

Accessible attitudes influence categorization of multiply categorizable objects (1996)
Eliot R. Smith, Russell H. Fazio and Mary Ann Cejka
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71 (5), 888-898

Affective and cognitive implications of group membership becoming part of the self: New models of prejudice and of the self-concept (1999)
Eliot R. Smith
Blackwell. 183-196

Aggression, hatred, and other emotions (2005)
Eliot R. Smith and Diane M. Mackie
Blackwell. 361-376

An in-group becomes part of the self: Response time evidence (1996)
Eliot R. Smith and Susan M. Henry
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22 (6), 635-642

Antecedents and consequences of satisfaction and guilt following ingroup aggression (2007)
Angela T. Maitner, Diane M. Mackie and Eliot R. Smith
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 10 (2), 223-237

Associative and rule-based processing: A connectionist interpretation of dual process models (1999)
Eliot R. Smith and Jamie DeCoster
Guilford Press. 323-336

Attachment to groups: Theory and measurement (1999)
Eliot R. Smith, Julie Murphy and Susan Coats
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (1), 94-110

Attribution theory and research: Returning to Heider's conceptions (1994)
Eliot R. Smith
Academic Press. 77-108

Beyond the actor's traits: Forming impressions of actors, targets, and relationships from social behaviors (1993)
Kurt P. Frey and Eliot R. Smith
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (3), 486-493

Conceptualizing social identity: A new framework and evidence for the impact of different dimensions (1999)
Jay W. Jackson and Eliot R. Smith
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (1), 120-135

Distinctiveness and memory: A comparison of the social and cognitive literatures (2006)
Susan Coats and Eliot R. Smith
Oxford University Press. 313-337

Dual process models in social and cognitive psychology: Conceptual integration and links to underlying memory systems (2000)
Eliot R. Smith and Jamie DeCoster
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4 (2), 108-131

Effects of inequality and reasons for inequality on group identification and cooperation in social dilemmas (2003)
Eliot R. Smith, Jay W. Jackson and Cheri W. Sparks
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 6 (2), 201-220

Effects of intergroup contact and political predispositions on prejudice: Role of intergroup emotions (2004)
Daniel A. Miller, Eliot R. Smith and Diane M. Mackie
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 7 (3), 221-237

Emotion processes considered from the perspective of dual-process models (2007)
Eliot R. Smith and Roland Neumann
Guilford. 287-311

Dissertation Committee Service

Dissertation Committee Service
Author	Dissertation Title	Committee
Mason, Winter	Implicit Social Influence (August 2007)	Smith, E. (Co-Chair), Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Tormala, Z., Sporns, O.
Place, Skyler	Non-Independent Mate Choice in Humans: Deciphering And Utilizing Information in a Social Environment (July 2010)	Todd, P. (Co-Chair), Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Smith, E., Wasserman, S., West, M.
Roberts, Michael	Human Collective Behavior: Complex systems properties of self-organizations, coordination, and emergent. (July 2008)	Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Ostrom, E. (Co-Chair), Smith, E., Todd, P.
Thomas, Wisdom	Incentives, Innovation, and Imitation: Social Learning in a Networked Group (August 2010)	Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Ostrom, E. (Co-Chair), Collins, K., Gold, J., Smith, E.

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