Professor Kerri Johnson in the news!

Hard to Think Straight: Processing Prejudice.  We all have a bit of irrationality in us. Even if we think of ourselves as logical and deliberative, we still make decisions and judgments based not entirely on the facts of the matter, but upon seemingly inconsequential information, random cues that we take from the world around us.Some of our irrational thinking is just quirky. For example, simply reading food labels in a difficult-to-read typeface can make us more fearful of food additives, while an easy-to-read label can diminish our perception of risk. We are more reluctant to ride roller coasters — and even to invest in new companies — with difficult-to-pronounce names. In general, we like more — and fear less — anything that we can perceive and mentally process with ease.Psychological scientists call this the familiarity heuristic, or the fluency bias. Ease of cognitive processing is a powerful cognitive cue to what’s familiar, and familiarity distinguishes the safe and good from the perilous. Sometimes these irrational judgments go beyond the merely quirky, and indeed can have serious consequences.That’s the view of two UCLA scientists, David Lick and Kerri Johnson, who have been investigating the ways that familiarity and fluency, as cognitive cues, might skew our interpersonal judgments. Specifically, they believe that fluency and familiarity might play a significant part in personal prejudice, operating at the most basic cognitive level. They summarize their work, and that of others, in a forthcoming issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.  Click here to read more…