Research
I investigate the psychology of blame and punishment. Please visit my lab website for more details:
Blame Lab (BLAB): https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/blamelab/
Selected Publications
Gill, M.J. & Zungu (in press). What do other people think he deserves? Social influence on utilization of mitigating information regarding a violent offender's unfortunate life history. PLoS ONE.
Gill, M.J., Alam, R., & Nagelhout, C. (2023). Tweeting others with respect: Historicist thinking can reduce blame and hostile retaliation to nasty communications from partisan opponents. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 14(3), 286-294.
Gill, M.J. & Pizzuto, A.E. (2022). Unwilling to un-blame: Whites who dismiss historical causes of societal disparities also dismiss personal mitigating information for Black offenders. Social Cognition, 40(1), 55-87.
Gill, M.J., Andreychik, M.R., & Getty, P.D. (2021). Those who ignore the past are doomed...to be heartless: Lay historicist theory is associated with humane responses to the struggles and transgressions of others. PLOS One. On-line version available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246882
Gill, M.J. & Cerce, S.C. (2021). The Blame Intensity Inventory: Assessing the propensity to blame harshly and its unique capacity to predict malicious satisfaction from offender victimization. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. On-line version at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220985362
Gill, M. J. & Thalla, N. (2020). When history becomes his story: Shifts in narrative perspective weaken the blame mitigating force of life history narratives. British Journal of Social Psychology, 59, 311-328.
Gill, M. J. & Ungson, N. D. (2018). How much blame does he truly deserve? Historicist narratives engender uncertainty about blameworthiness, facilitating motivated cognition in moral judgment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 77, 11-23.
Gill, M. J. & Cerce, S. C. (2017). He never willed to have the will he has: Historicist narratives, "civilized” blame, and the need to distinguish two notions of free will. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(3), 361-382.
Gill, M. J. & Getty, P. D. (2016). On shifting the blame to humanity: Historicist narratives regarding transgressors evoke compassion for the transgressor but disdain for humanity. British Journal of Social Psychology, 55(4), 773-791.
Gill, M. J. & Mendes, D. M. (2016). When the minority thinks "essentially" like the majority: Blacks distinguish bio-somatic from bio-behavioral essentialism in their conceptions of Whites, and only the latter predicts prejudice. PLoS ONE, 11(8), e0160086. At: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0160086
Andreychik, M. R. & Gill, M. J. (2015). Do natural kind beliefs about social groups contribute to prejudice?: Distinguishing bio-somatic from bio-behavioral essentialism, and both of these from entitativity. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 18(4), 454-474.
Gill, M. J. & Andreychik, M. R. (2014). The Social Explanatory Style Questionnaire: Assessing moderators of basic social-cognitive phenomena including spontaneous trait inference, the Fundamental Attribution Error, and moral blame. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e100886. At: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0100886
Gill, M. J., Andreychik, M. R., & Getty, P. D. (2013). More than a lack of control: External explanations can evoke compassion for outgroups by increasing perceptions of suffering (independent of perceived control). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(1), 73-87.
Gill, M. J., Packer, D. J., & Van Bavel, J. (2013). More to morality than mutualism: Consistent contributors exist and they can inspire costly generosity in others. [Commentary on Baumard et al., A Mutualistic Approach to Morality]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(1), 90.
Moskowitz, G.B. & Gill, M.J. (2013). Interpersonal perception: From snap judgments to the regulation of enduring relationships. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Andreychik, M. R. & Gill, M. J. (2012). Do negative implicit associations indicate negative attitudes?: Social explanations moderate whether ostensible "negative" associations are prejudice-based or empathy-based. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 1082-1093.
Andreychik, M. R . & Gill, M.J. (2009). Ingroup identity moderates the impact of social explanations on intergroup attitudes: External explanations are not inherently prosocial. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 1632-1645.
Gill, M. J. & Andreychik, M. A. (2009). Getting emotional about explanations: Social explanations and social explanatory styles as bases of prosocial emotions and intergroup attitudes. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(6), 1038-1054.
Gill, M. J. & Andreychik, M. R. (2007). Explanation and intergroup emotion: Social explanations as a foundation of prejudice-related compunction. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations [Special Issue on Intergroup Emotion], 10, 87-106.
Gill, M.J. (2004). When information does not deter stereotyping: Prescriptive stereotyping can bias judgments under conditions that discourage descriptive stereotyping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(5), 619-632.
Gill, M. J. (2003). Biased against "them" more than "him": Stereotype use in group-directed and individual-directed judgment. Social Cognition, 21(3), 321-348.
Professor
Chair
Chandler-Ullmann room 114
610.758.6577
UT-Austin, Ph.D. Psychology, 1998
UNC-Charlotte, B.A. Psychology, 1993
Teaching Interests:
Psychology of Evil
Psychology of Morality
Personality