Russell H. Fazio

Russell H. Fazio
Born October 9, 1952
Utica, New York
Fields Social psychology
Institutions Ohio State University
Indiana University
Alma mater Princeton University (M.A., 1976; Ph.D., 1978)
Cornell University
Known for Affective priming, Autmoatic attitudes, Bona fide pipeline, Social cognition

Russell Fazio is Harold E. Burtt Professor of Social Psychology at Ohio State University, where he heads Russ’ Attitude and Social Cognition Lab (RASCL).[1][2] Fazio’s work focuses on social psychological phenomena like attitude formation and change, the relationship between attitudes and behavior, and the automatic and controlled cognitive processes that guide social behavior.[2]

Education and Academic Career

Russell Fazio received his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University in 1974, where he graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[3] He then attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving his Master of Arts in 1976 followed by his Doctor of Philosophy in Social Psychology in 1978.[3]

In 1978, Fazio became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Indiana University and in 1981, he became an Associate Professor at the same institution. In 1985, he became a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, still at Indiana University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Exeter in 1997. In 2001, he moved to Ohio State University, becoming a Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Psychology. Since 2002, Fazio has been at Ohio State University as the Harold E. Burtt Chair in Psychology. He also runs a lab called RASCL (Russ’ Attitude and Social Cognition Lab) at Ohio State.[3]

Research

Affective priming and automatic attitudes

David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt laid the groundwork for Fazio’s work on affective priming in 1971 with the development of the lexical decision task. The findings of their experiments indicated that lexical decisions for concepts associated with a prime were facilitated by exposure to the prime (i.e., the presentation of the word “doctor” as a prime facilitated identifying the word “nurse”).[4] These findings and others[5] suggested that concepts associated with a prime are automatically activated from memory up on presentation of the prime, and so the prime acts to facilitate responding to semantically related target words.

In a 1986 paper, Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes expanded the research on automatic activation to attitudes, reasoning that a similar priming effect should be found. To test the idea, attitude objects were used as primes, with evaluative adjectives used as target words. Participants were primed with attitude objects and were instructed to indicate whether the target word they saw meant “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible.[6][7] The focus of these experiments was on the latency of the judgment and to what extent the judgment was facilitated by the presentation of an attitude object as a prime.[7]

In three experiments, Fazio and his colleagues found evidence for automatic attitude activation, as well as evidence for facilitation.[6] Participant responding was faster on trials where the primed attitude objects matched the connotation of the target words: for example, if participants were primed with the attitude object “cockroach”, they were quicker to identify a negative target word (i.e., “disgusting”) as negative, but were slower to identify a positive target word (e.g., “appealing”) as positive. Participants were faster to identify positive word when attitude objects were positive, and faster to identify negative words when the attitude objects were negative.

Bona-Fide Pipeline

The bona fide pipeline is a method used to obtain affect and attitude towards various objects or ideas. Fazio’s work on the bona fide pipeline expanded on the bogus pipeline. The bogus pipeline is a method where a subject is told that the researchers will be recording their physiological responses and through those responses, will be able to tell if the subject is lying.[8] This method is similar to a lie detector test. Both the bogus and the bona fide pipelines attempt to measure attitudes without having to deal with the influences of social desirability. Social desirability is when a respondent answers questions so that they will be seen favorably by others.[8][9] The bona fide pipeline was created as an alternative to the bogus pipeline.

The bona fide pipeline started as a way to measure how attitudes are activated from memory, then Fazio began testing ways to use the bona fide pipeline to measure racial attitudes. The procedure involves priming, then assessment of a target stimulus, often by pressing one of two buttons on a keyboard. The prime is often a word or a picture. If the prime and target match the subject’s attitude, the time it takes them to assess the target stimulus should be faster, and if they conflict, their response time should be slower.[9] An example of this is showing a picture of a face such as an African American face, followed by a word the subject has to categorize as “good” or “bad”. If the subject has bias against African Americans, their response time to categorizing “bad” words will be faster when an African American face is presented and their response time to categorizing “good” words will be increased.

Awards

Service activities

Fazio has been a member of these organizations:

Selected Publications

Books

Selected Journal Articles

See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ Fazio, R. H. "Russell Fazio Ohio State University Faculty Page." http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/size2/page.htm Retrieved May 26, 2014
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Fazio, R. H. "Russ' Attitude and Social Cognition Lab page." http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/rascl/Lab.htm Retrieved May 26, 2014
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Fazio, R. "Russ Fazio's Homepage". Ohio State University. Retrieved May 23, 2014.
  4. ↑ Meyer, D. E. & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90(2), 227-234. http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/documents/MeyerSchvaneveldt1971.pdf
  5. ↑ Schneider, W. & R. M. Shiffrin. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: 1. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84, pp1-66.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229-238.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Fazio, R. H. (2001). On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview. Cognition & Emotion, 15(2), 115-141. http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/faculty/fazio/reprints_pdf/cogemo.pdf
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Sigall, H; Jones, E. "The bogus pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude". Psychological Bulletin: 349–364. doi:10.1037/h0031617.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Fazio, R; Jackson, J.R.; Dunton, B.C.; Williams, C.J. (1995). "Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline?". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69: 1013–1027. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.69.6.1013.
  10. ↑ Russell H. Fazio. Ph.D. Retrieved April 23, 2008, from Harold E. Burtt Professor of Psychology Web site: http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/fazio/size2/page.htm