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Department of

Psychology

Linderman Library Rotunda stained glass dome
Michael Gill, Professor of Psychology at Lehigh University

Michael Gill

Professor

Chair

610.758.6577
mjg6@lehigh.edu
Chandler-Ullmann room 114
Education:

Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, Social and Personality Psychology

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Additional Interests

  • Psychology of blame
  • Intergroup relations

Research Statement

Anyone can become angry—that is easy; but to become angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everyone’s power and is not easy.    —Aristotle

Blame permeates our social world.  The ubiquity of blame in human affairs likely explains the robust interest in the topic shown from ancient times (Aristotle, BCE/2012; Buddha, BCE/2003; Deuteronomy 25: 1-2), through the influential European Enlightenment scholars (Kant, 1785; Smith, 1759), up to our modern interdisciplinary focus on blame within the disciplines of criminal justice (Cullen & Gilbert, 2012), philosophy (Coates & Tognazzini, 2012), organizational behavior (Edmondson, 2018), child development (Baumrind, 2013), close relationships (Gottman, 2015), and social psychology (Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2014). Blaming arguably reflects a basic human instinct of striving to uphold norms (Van Prooijen, 2018).

Blame is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be constructive, such as when a parent firmly-yet-warmly communicates that a child’s behavior is unacceptable and the child learns to make better choices, or when a disadvantaged group gets angry about societal injustice and engages in non-violent collective action to encourage justice. On the other hand, blame can be destructive, such as when a parent furiously berates a child for bad behavior and the child develops a sense of shame and a hostile attitude toward the world, or when a disadvantaged group begins to hate a dominant group and initiates a campaign of wanton violence.

We think it is futile to ask whether, on balance, blame is mostly constructive or mostly destructive. Instead, much work in our lab is rooted in the idea that blame intensity is crucial for understanding when blame will be relatively constructive or relatively destructive. Specifically, we assume that excessive blame—over-blaming—is what creates negative impacts. In line with this perspective, much of our work in the Blame Lab examines how harsh, punitive blame—or over-blaming—can be tempered into blame that is wiser and more constructive. As we explore this issue, we aim to make contributions in the areas of the psychology of blame and punishment, the psychology of free will beliefs, intergroup attitudes, moral emotions, attribution theory, and social justice. We also pursue an interdisciplinary angle by connecting our work to ideas from moral philosophy.

Biography

Professor Gill earned his Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology in 1998 from the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to the Lehigh Valley about two weeks after defending his dissertation and started his career at Lehigh University in the Fall semester of 1998. He recently celebrated 25 years of service to Lehigh. Professor Gill is currently Full Professor in the Psychology Department and has served as Department Chair since 2019. He particularly appreciates the dual emphasis that Lehigh places on research and teaching. Over his years at Lehigh, he has continued to publish research in the top journals of his field while also intensively teaching and mentoring a highly talented pool of undergraduate students. He derives great satisfaction from both activities. In his spare time, Professor Gill enjoys spending time with his family and friends, hiking, mountain biking, meditating, and seeing live music. 

Gill, M.J. & Zungu, S.P. (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.  

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.  

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.  

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.  

Gill, M. J., Andreychik, M. R., & Getty, P. D. (2013). More than a lack of control: External explanations evoke compassion by increasing perceptions of suffering (independent of perceived control).  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39, 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(5), 1082-1093.  

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.  

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. 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. & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2004). On what it means to know a person: A matter of pragmatics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(3), 405-414.

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.  

Gilbert, D. T., Gill, M. J., & Wilson, T. D. (2002). The future is now: Temporal correction in affective forecasting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 88, 430-444.

Gilbert, D. T. & Gill, M. J. (2000). The momentary realist. Psychological Science, 11, 394-398.

Gill, M. J., Swann, W. B., Jr. & Silvera, D. H. (1998). On the genesis of confidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1101-1114.

Swann, W. B., Jr. & Gill, M. J. (1998). Beliefs, confidence, and the widows Ademoski: On knowing what we know about others. In V. Y. Yzerbyt, G. Lories, & B. Dardenne (Eds.), Metacognition: Cognitive and social dimensions. London: Sage.

Swann, W. B., Jr. & Gill, M. J. (1997). Confidence and accuracy in person perception: Do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 747-757.

Teaching

Personality, Psychology of Evil, Psychology of Morality