Social Psychology Network

Maintained by Scott Plous, Wesleyan University

Paul Windschitl

Paul Windschitl

My recent and current research projects focus on the following questions:

(1) How do people make judgments of likelihood? When there are several possible outcomes to a situation, how do people go about considering evidence relevant to those possible outcomes?

(2) How do motivations influence one's optimism about experiencing positive and negative events?

(3) How do comparisons (both social and nonsocial) affect people's perceptions of an event's likelihood. How do such comparisons affect perceptions of personal vulnerability to negative events?

(4) What is the best way to assess someone's perceptions of likelihood (or risk or personal vulnerability)? Are numeric measures of subjective probability adequate, or do verbal or other nonnumeric measure hold important advantages over subjective probability measures?

(5) In competitive situations, how do people interpret the influence of situational factors on their likelihood of succeeding? Do they assume that a difficult situation will be harder for themselves than it will be for others?

(6) What is the role of egocentrism in people's evaluations of how well a treatment (e.g., alternative medicine, listening to music) works for other people?

(7) What are the nonmotivated biases that influence people's judgments about how their abilities compare to those of others? What nonmotivated biases influence nonsocial judgments, such as how pleasant one sofa is compared to another?

Primary Interests:

  • Causal Attribution
  • Interpersonal Processes
  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Motivation, Goal Setting
  • Person Perception
  • Personality, Individual Differences
  • Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

Journal Articles:

Courses Taught:

  • Advanced Social Cognition
  • Introduction to Social Psychology
  • Laboratory in Psychology: Decision Making
  • Personality and Social Psychology Seminar
  • Social Cognition
  • Social Judgment and Decision Processes

Paul Windschitl
Department of Psychology
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242
United States

  • Phone: (319) 335-2435
  • Fax: (319) 335-0191

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