Gordon Moskowitz

Professor

610.758.3624

gbm4@lehigh.edu

Chandler-Ullmann room 102

Education:

New York University, MA, 1989. PhD, 1993

McGill University, Bachelor of science, Majored in Psychology, 1984

Max-Planck-Institute, Munich, Germany, Post Doctoral Position, May 1992 - September 1993

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Research Areas

Additional Interests

Social cognition
Implicit bias
Stereotyping
Impression formation
Person memory
Minority influence
Creativity
Spontaneous trait inference
Priming effects
Self-regulation
Proactive control
Implicit goals/volition
Perspective taking

Research Statement

My broadest identification is as a researcher in the domain of "social cognition," defined as “the study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world.” My research interests span many content areas within this broad classification, and these interests are tied together by a general concern with unconscious influences on how we perceive and judge people, and the possibility for our goals to similarly be held, and to operate, unconsciously. My research has focused especially on topics such as snap judgments made of others within the first second of seeing them. In my early career my colleagues and I were the first to illustrate that making inferences about other people is so pervasive that it happens automatically, immediately, without our recognition, and without us needing an explicit goal to engage in such evaluations and judgments. It is part and parcel of how people are perceived as they enter our visual space.

This research led me naturally to the question of how stereotypes influence these snap judgments and whether stereotyping is in some sense also part and parcel of the perception process, happening without our awareness, explicit intent, and despite our better nature. This links to the related question of how such fast-acting biases can be controlled and ultimately how to change unwarranted beliefs and attitudes. The answers I have pursued illustrate that such “immediate” processes can be controlled and bias reduced due to a motivational system that is equally automatic. My research introduced a novel view of how we can control stereotyping through goals we are not consciously trying to pursue. That is, implicit stereotyping is best controlled when the goal of not stereotyping is routinized, habitualized, and automated so that it is pursued effortlessly. Of course, a variety of other types of goals that are less “automatic” can also help us to regulate our biases, and my research has focused on topics such as perspective taking, egalitarianism, implementation intentions, creativity, ambivalence, thought suppression, and negative feedback as means to help control bias. In summary, my research program lies at the intersection of unconscious social judgment and unconscious goals, with an emphasis on control over phenomena (like stereotyping) typically conceived of as difficult, if not impossible, to control. Those difficulties are overcome by making goal pursuit efficient.

In the last decade I have turned toward examining why interventions meant to reduce bias may fail (with a focus on defensiveness and backlash in response to workshops aimed at raising awareness about bias), and when they may succeed. This work relies on applying principles of social cognition and implicit goals to interventions to reduce bias. With Jeff Stone at the University of Arizona we have developed a workshop based on such principles being implemented with medical and nursing students, and tracking the success of the intervention at lowering bias in medical professionals. Looking to the future, it is my hope to continue to investigate how our judgments of others not merely form, but are transformed and updated through new learning and interventions aimed at altering our impressions. Hopefully the nuance of how knowledge forms, is encoded, and updated – as provided by social cognition -- can inform policy and interventions that hope to successfully mitigate biases that exist in organizations and society more generally.

Biography

My passion for psychology, and social cognition specifically, has been fueled by the times in which I live. I was born in the 1960s in Brooklyn, just after the baby boom. My parents lived through the depression and World War 2, my grandparents were immigrants who worked long hours to make a life in a new country (like many others). As an early member of Generation X, I was raised in a culture very different from the world my relatives knew that was defined by race and gender bias, one where genocide and segregation could thrive. Mine was a world of civil rights laws being passed, the women’s movement taking shape, and greater freedom of expression. It is also one where, post-Watergate, the ideological divide has widened, implicit bias grown, and. overt bias has waxed and waned. It has been easy for me to focus on how and why social influences impact the individuals and structures within our society.

As for many young people, I entered college and my life would change. In my first semester at college I had a course with one of the great teachers of Social Psychology – Don Taylor of McGill University. I was drawn in as a 17-year-old during his very first lecture. I was fortunate to stumble into the circle of such an amazing teacher. Next, at age 21, I again found myself fortunate – I had joined a graduate training program at New York University, which during my years there become the global center for social cognition. An amazing collection of young faculty, all doing research on this young discipline, were gathered in New York city and attracted visiting scholars from around the world. Each of our faculty (Bargh, Chaiken, Higgins, Ruble, Trope, Uleman) has recently won recognition by various organizations for career contributions to the field. After graduate school I again was fortunate to find myself working as a post-doctoral scholar with the world’s leading researcher blending the study of motivation with social cognition – Peter Gollwitzer. This academic journey took me from Montreal to Manhattan to Munich, having uniquely positioned me to be at the cutting edge of the field’s development, paired with its most impressive scholars. This allowed a final stroke of fortune, being hired at Princeton University, where I was mentored by senior colleagues who were some of the great psychologists of the 20^th century – Nancy Cantor, Joel Cooper, John Darley, Susan Fiske, Sam Glucksberg, Charlie Gross, Marcia Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Dale Miller, Rich Petty, and Anne Treisman. From there I moved to Lehigh to start a family with my wife Cindy, and we have been here for over 20 years enjoying the outdoors, music, and proximity to NYC and Philadelphia.

Books:

Moskowitz, G.B. (in press). Introduction to Social Cognition: The Essential Questions and Ideas. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Balcetis, E. & Moskowitz, G.B. (Eds., 2023). Handbook of Impression Formation. New York: Psychology Press/Taylor and Francis.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Grant, H. (Eds., 2009). The Psychology of Goals. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Moskowitz, G.B. (2005). Social Cognition: Understanding Self and Others. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Moskowitz, G.B. (Ed., 2001). Cognitive Social Psychology: Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Peer Reviewed Publications:

Moskowitz, G.B., & Olcaysoy Okten, I. (2023). Major Themes in the History of Social Cognition. In D. Carlston, K. Hugenberg, & K. Johnson (Eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition, Volume Two. Oxford University Press.

Moskowitz, G.B., Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Schneid, E. (2023). The Updating of First Impressions. In E. Balcetis & G.B. Moskowitz (Eds.). Handbook of Impression Formation: A Social Psychological Approach (pp. 348-392). New York: Routledge.

Moskowitz, G.B., Balcetis, E. (2023). Impression Formation in Social Psychology. In E. Balcetis & G.B. Moskowitz (Eds.). Handbook of Impression Formation: A Social Psychological Approach. New York: Routledge.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Vitriol, J.A. (2022). A Social Cognition Model of Bias Reduction. In A. Nordstrom & W. Goodfriend (Eds.), Innovative Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Programs (pp. 1-39). Oxon, UK: Taylor and Francis.

Rothman, N., Vitriol, J., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2022). Internal conflict and prejudice-regulation: Emotional ambivalence buffers against defensive responding to implicit bias feedback. PLOSOne, 17(3): e0264535. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0264535

Sassenberg, K., Winter, K., Becker, D., Ditrich, D., Scholl, A., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2021). The flexibility mindset: Reducing the impact of undesired spontaneous inclinations. European Review of Social Psychology, 33(1), 171-213. DOI: 10.1080/10463283.2021.1959124.

Moskowitz, G.B.. Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Sackett, A. (2021). Attributing inferred causes and explanations to behavior. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, 32. https://oxfordre.com/psychology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.001….

Wolsiefer, K., Mehl, M. Moskowitz, G.B., Cagno, C., Zestcott, CA., Tejeda-Padron, A., & Stone, J. (2021). Investigating the relationship between resident physician implicit bias and language use during a clinical encounter with Hispanic patients. Health Communication, 36, https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1936756

Vitriol, J., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2021). Reducing Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback: On the Role of Perceived Moral Threat and Efficacy to Change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104165

Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2020). Easy to Make, Hard to Revise: Updating Spontaneous Trait Inferences in the Presence of Trait-Inconsistent Information. Social Cognition, 38(6), 571-624.

Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2020). Spontaneous goal versus spontaneous trait inferences: How ideology shapes attributions and explanations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(1), 177-188.

Stone, J., Moskowitz, G.B., Zestcott, C. & Wolsiefer, K. (2020). Testing active learning workshops for reducing implicit stereotyping of Hispanics by majority and minority group medical students. Stigma and Health, 5(1), 94-103.

Olcaysoy Okten, I., Schneid, E., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2019). On the Updating of Spontaneous Impressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(1), 1-25.

Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2018). Goal vs. Trait Explanations: Causal attributions beyond the trait-situation dichotomy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114 (2), 211-229.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Carter, D. (2018). Confirmation Bias and the Stereotype of the Black Athlete. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 36, 139-146.

Moskowitz, G.B., Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Gooch, C.M. (2017). Distortion in time perception as a result of concern about appearing biased. PLOSOne, 12(8): e0182241. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182241.

Sassenberg, K., Moskowitz, G.B., Fetterman, A., & Kessler, T. (2017). Priming Creativity as a Strategy to Increase Creative Performance by Facilitating the Activation and Use of Remote Associations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68. 128-138.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Olcaysoy Okten, I. (2016). Spontaneous Goal Inference (SGI). Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10 (1), 64–80. DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12232

Moskowitz, G. B., & Olcaysoy Okten, I. (2016). Teaching & Learning Guide for: Spontaneous Goal Inference (SGI). Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(3), 164-168.

Moskowitz, G.B., Olcaysoy Okten, I., & Gooch, C.M. (2015). On race and time. Psychological Science, 26(11), 1783-94. DOI: 10.1177/0956797615599547

Bean, M.G., Focella, E.S., Covarrubias, R., Stone, J.A., Badger, T.A., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2014). Documenting Nursing and Medical Students’ Stereotypes about Hispanic and American Indian Patients. Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, 7, 14-22.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Balcetis, E. (2014). The Conscious Roots of Selfless, Unconscious Goals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(2),151. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X13002100.

Bean, M.G., Stone, J., Moskowitz, G.B., Badger, T.A., & Focella, E.S. (2013). Evidence of Nonconscious Stereotyping of Hispanic Patients by Nursing and Medical Students. Nursing Research, 62(5), 362-267.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Stone, J. (2012). The Proactive Control of Stereotype Activation: Implicit Goals to Not Stereotype. Journal of Psychology, 220(3), 172-179.

Moskowitz, G.B., Stone, J., & Childs, A. (2012). Implicit Stereotyping and Medical Decisions: Unconscious Stereotype Activation in Practitioners’ Thoughts About African Americans. American Journal of Public Health, 102 (5), 996-1001.

Stone, J., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2011). Nonconscious racial bias in medical decision-making: What can be done to avoid it? Medical Education, 45, 768-776.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Li, P. (2011). Egalitarian Goals Trigger Stereotype Inhibition: A Proactive Form of Stereotype Control. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(1), 103-116.

Moskowitz, G.B., Li, P., Ignarri, C., & Stone, J. (2011). Compensatory cognition associated with egalitarian goals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 365-370.

Moskowitz, G.B. (2010). On the Control Over Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Inhibition. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4 (2), 140-158.

Bayer, U., Achtziger, A., Gollwitzer, P.M., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2009). Responding to Subliminal Cues: Do If-Then Plans Facilitate Action Preparation and Initiation without Conscious Intent? Social Cognition, 27, 183-201.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Ignarri, C. (2009). Implicit Volition and Stereotype Control. European Review of Social Psychology, 20, 97-145.

Galinsky, A.D., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2007). Further ironies of suppression: Stereotype and counter-stereotype accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 833-841.

Sassenberg, K., Moskowitz, G.B., Jacoby, J., & Hansen, N. (2007). The carry-over effect of competition: The impact of competition on prejudice towards uninvolved outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 529-538.

Moskowitz, G.B., and Li, P. (2006). One, two, three, what are we fighting, four? Psychological Inquiry, 17 (3), 223-230.

Sassenberg, K. & Moskowitz, G.B. (2005). Do not stereotype, think different! Overcoming automatic stereotype activation by mindset priming. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41 (5), 317-413.

Moskowitz, G.B., Li, P., & Kirk, E. (2004). The implicit volition model: On the preconscious regulation of temporarily adopted goals. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Volume 36, pp. 317-413). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Garcia, S.M., Weaver, K., Moskowitz, G.B., & Darley, J.M. (2002). Crowded Minds: The Implicit Bystander Effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 843-853.

Moskowitz, G.B. (2002). Preconscious effects of temporary goals on attention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 397-404.

Galinsky, A.D., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2000). Perspective taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 708-724.

Galinsky, A.D., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2000). Counterfactuals as behavioral primes: Priming the simulation heuristic and consideration of alternatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 384-409.

Galinsky, A., Moskowitz, G.B., & Skurnik, I. (2000). Counterfactuals as self-generated primes: Priming the simulation heuristic and consideration of alternatives. Social Cognition, 18, 252-280.

Moskowitz, G.B., Salomon, A.R., & Taylor, C.M. (2000). Preconsciously controlling stereotyping: Implicitly activated egalitarian goals prevent the activation of stereotypes. Social Cognition, 18, 151-177.

Moskowitz, G.B., & Otten, S. (2000). Evidence for implicit evaluative ingroup bias: Affect-biased spontaneous trait inference in a minimal group paradigm. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 77-89.

Moskowitz, G.B., Gollwitzer, P.M., Wasel, W., & Schaal, B. (1999). Preconscious control of stereotype activation through chronic egalitarian goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 167-184

Moskowitz, G.B., & Skurnik, I. (1999). Contrast effects as determined by the type of prime: Trait versus exemplar primes initiate processing strategies that differ in how accessible constructs are used. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, 911-927.

Teaching

Psychology 121: Social Psychology
Psychology 202: Statistics
Psychology 311: The psychology of stereotyping and prejudice
Psychology 314: Social Cognition
Psychology 406: Graduate Seminar in Social Cognition

At Lehigh I also see changing our institutional culture as part of my teaching mission, applying what I know about the science of bias reduction to our local community. I was a co-author of our principles of equitable community, developed with colleagues the climate survey that was used for several years, served on the inaugural council for equity and community (CEC), served on the inaugural faculty of staff and color network, created the social justice scholars network, was a member of the democratic policing forum, served on the committee to renovate UMOJA house, chaired the MLK committee (and hosted an annual MLK day event for several years), served on the COACHE committee, as well as serving on several committees nationally aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion in the sciences and funding agencies.