Resume

• 2009

  PhD

  Political Psychology

• 2007

  graduate certificate

  Political Psychology

• 1998

  BA

  Government

  Psychology

• Data Analysis

  Public Policy

  Program Evaluation

  Market Research

  SPSS

  Higher Education

  Editing

  Project Management

  Proposal Writing

  Research

  Statistics

  Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues

  A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research

  however

  suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism

  and (2) political sophistication plays an important role in moderating the translation of needs into political preferences within the economic domain. The present article extends this work by offering a theoretical model of the heterogeneous translation of personality dispositions into political preferences across issues and issue domains. We argue that these needs structure preferences directly for highly symbolic issues like those in the social domain

  but they structure preferences indirectly through partisanship for difficult issues like those in the economic domain. We test this theory utilizing a national survey experiment in the United States and explore its broader implications for both the literature on the psychological determinants of political ideology and for debates over the “culture war” in the United States.

  Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues

  The people we associate with everyday have an important influence on our exposure and reactions to political stimuli. Social network members in particular can have a dramatic impact on our political views and behavior. Prior research suggests that these attitudinal differences may reflect the information available in a social network: attitudinally congruent networks expose individuals to supporting positions

  bolstering their views

  while heterogeneous networks provide information on both sides of an issue

  generating doubt and ambivalence. In contrast

  the current studies examine the effects of individuals’ networks in motivating them to find and engage with new political information on their own. Using ANES panel data

  a laboratory-based information board session that examines behavior in detail

  and an experimental design that manipulates network composition

  we find that individuals in attitudinally heterogeneous social networks are more likely to seek out and attend to political information. They spend more time looking for political information

  and then (having found it) spend more time reviewing that new information compared to those whose network members are more like-minded. An experimental study further demonstrates that network composition causally determines these information-seeking preferences. Implications for democratic citizenship in light of these findings are discussed.

  Social Context and Information Seeking: Examining the Effects of Network Attitudinal Composition on Engagement with Political Information

  Stony Brook University

  American Institutes for Research

  George Washington University

  University of Mississippi

  -- Conducted research and development on alternate assessments for students with cognitive disabilities for the states of Ohio

  South Carolina

  and New Mexico. \n-- Served as research coordinator on a pilot study that examined the link between student's cognitive deficiencies and their performance on modified test items. \n-- Involved in various project management

  proposal writing

  professional development and data management activities in relation to large-scale test assessments.

  American Institutes for Research

  University of Mississippi

  Oxford

  MS

  Research Interests: American politics

  Political Pscyhology

  Public Opinion

  Voting Behavior

  Political Communication\n\nCourses Taught: \nUndergraduate level -- POL 101 (Intro American Politics); POL 251 (Intro to Political Science Research Methods)\nGraduate level -- POL 551 (Empirical Political Analysis); POL 552 (Applied Political Research)

  Assistant Professor

  George Washington University

  Stony Brook University

  Stony Brook

  NY

  Graduate Teaching/Research Assistant