UTOPSS Conference

Presenter

Dr. Elliott Hammer (Xavier University of Louisiana

About the Presenter

Elliott Hammer is a Professor of Psychology and the John LaFarge Professor in Social Justice at Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black university in New Orleans. For more than 30 years, he has studied the antecedents and consequences of stereotypes and prejudice in the context of intergroup relations, and he has incorporated that research into publications and presentations to help mentors recognize the role their own biases may play in the experiences of their students. He regularly works with faculty to question some of the assumptions they might make and to take efforts to lessen the potential impact of their biases.

Elliott earned his BS degree from the University of Kansas and his MS and PhD in Experimental Social Psychology at Tulane University. After several years at Tennessee State University, where he won the University Teacher of the Year award, he joined Xavier’s faculty in 2000. His work has received support from NSF and NIH, through which he mentors students via the MARC, McNair, RISE, and BUILD programs. He also mentors student-athletes through his role as Faculty Athletics Representative, and he serves as Chief Reader for the Advanced Placement Psychology exam. He is currently working on a book about the psychology of gall.

Elliott and his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer─also a professor at Xavier─spend their free time traveling with their two rescue dogs and taking part in the unique culture of their adopted city of New Orleans.

Mountains out of Molehills: Why Gall Is at the Root of Our Psychology, and How to Rein It In

In this talk, I will discuss why the tendency to blow real or imagined slights out of proportion is so common in our culture. The need to be exact revenge or teaching someone a lesson can be overwhelming, often with regrettable─even disastrous─consequences. I will discuss research that indirectly explains why the galling behavior of others can affect our lives so disproportionately, and what we might be able to do about it.

Presenter

Dr. Jonathan Amburgey

About the Presenter

Jonathan Amburgey, Ph.D. is the Program Chair and an Associate Professor of Psychology and Affiliated Faculty of Data Science at Westminster University, Salt Lake City, UT. Dr. Amburgey received his PhD in experimental social psychology with emphases in quantitative and environmental psychology from the University of Utah. His research and teaching span areas of human social cognition, emotion, and behavior using interdisciplinary methods and statistical modeling approaches from the psychological/behavioral, neural, and data sciences. Dr. Amburgey regularly collaborates on interdisciplinary research projects with faculty colleagues and students in psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, data science, biology, public health, and environmental science.

For the past 13 years, he has taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including the longest running Learning Community for first-year students at Westminster University, Bust That Psych Myth, a reimagined, experiential introduction to psychological/behavioral science, paired with a mathematics and probability course, focusing on scientific and probabilistic reasoning skills, cognitive biases, and debunking common myths/misconceptions about human behavior. Dr. Amburgey also regularly teaches courses in social psychology and social neuroscience, scientific reasoning and writing, experimental methods and statistics, structural equation modeling, environmental psychology, and is a co-instructor of an interdisciplinary field study course along the Green River of Desolation Canyon, UT, that explores human-nature interactions.

Wait, That’s a Myth?! Teaching Scientific Reasoning to Change Misconceptions About Human Behavior

In this session, I’ll share student course data highlighting common myths/misconceptions and beliefs about people and behavior. We’ll explore strategies for teaching students to think scientifically, and I’ll offer practical, scalable activities and assignments for developing and evaluating scientific reasoning skills in the classroom.