Dr. Higginbotham will give a live presentation via Zoom on Tuesday, August 16th, at 3:30 pm.
The talk is titled "American Histories of Racism: A Critical Social Context and Perceptual Object."
Understanding history is essential to understanding how we have arrived at the present moment. Therefore, from a psychological perspective, there is good reason to suspect that knowledge about and an understanding of history is critical to understanding how individuals presently think about the self, other individuals, and groups. In my research, I use history to derive hypotheses, inform methods, and directly manipulate individual social cognitions. My research uses history as a context for informing hypotheses and designing studies to understand how individuals think about the self, others, and history itself. This talk covers distinct, yet interrelated lines of research that demonstrate both how history operates as important contextual information with implications for individual social cognitions and how what we think about history is subjective and prone to typical social cognitive biases. Using the domain of firearms and firearm policy, I will discuss the importance of taking a historical approach to the study of self and social perception. The final portion of the talk will center ongoing research that examines the role of race and racial attitudes in shaping how past anti-Black racism (e.g., the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921) is cognitively represented in relation to the present and the implications for our current sociopolitical context.
Click the Zoom link HERE to join.