George Y. Bizer, assistant professor of psychology, has had two articles accepted for publication. One, by Bizer, Z.L. Tormala, D.D. Rucker and R.E. Petty for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is titled “On-line versus memory-based processing: Implications for Attitude Strength.”
The way in which we process information about a new person – by evaluating each item as we learn it or by evaluating the entire group of items after learning all of them – has profound impacts on how strong our resultant attitudes will be. People who processed information in an “on-line” fashion were more certain about their opinions and were more likely to act upon their opinions.
Bizer also has written, with C.J. Weber, “The effects of immediate forewarning of test difficulty on test performance” for the Journal of General Psychology.
Warning students that a test they are about to take will be difficult impacted different types of students in different ways. High-anxiety students performed significantly worse when given such a warning, while low-anxiety students performed significantly better when given such a warning.