Paul Windschitl
My recent and current research projects focus on the following questions:
(1) How do people make judgments of likelihood? When there are several possible outcomes to a situation, how do people go about considering evidence relevant to those possible outcomes?
(2) How do motivations influence one's optimism about experiencing positive and negative events?
(3) How do comparisons (both social and nonsocial) affect people's perceptions of an event's likelihood. How do such comparisons affect perceptions of personal vulnerability to negative events?
(4) What is the best way to assess someone's perceptions of likelihood (or risk or personal vulnerability)? Are numeric measures of subjective probability adequate, or do verbal or other nonnumeric measure hold important advantages over subjective probability measures?
(5) In competitive situations, how do people interpret the influence of situational factors on their likelihood of succeeding? Do they assume that a difficult situation will be harder for themselves than it will be for others?
(6) What is the role of egocentrism in people's evaluations of how well a treatment (e.g., alternative medicine, listening to music) works for other people?
(7) What are the nonmotivated biases that influence people's judgments about how their abilities compare to those of others? What nonmotivated biases influence nonsocial judgments, such as how pleasant one sofa is compared to another?
Primary Interests:
- Causal Attribution
- Interpersonal Processes
- Judgment and Decision Making
- Motivation, Goal Setting
- Person Perception
- Personality, Individual Differences
- Social Cognition
Research Group or Laboratory:
Journal Articles:
- Chambers, J. R., & Windschitl, P. D. (2009). Evaluating one performance among others: The influence of rank and degree of exposure to comparison referents. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 776-792.
- Chambers, J. R., & Windschitl, P. D. (2004). Biases in social comparative judgments: The role of nonmotivated factors in above-average and comparative-optimism effects. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 813-838.
- Krizan, Z., & Windschitl, P. D. (2009). Wishful thinking about the future: Does desire impact optimism? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3, 227-243.
- Rose, J. P., Windschitl, P. D., & Jenson, M. E. (2011). The joint influence of consensus information and situational information on trait inferences for targets and populations. Social Cogntion, 29, 147-165.
- Wells, G. L., & Windschitl, P. D. (1999). Stimulus sampling and social psychological experimentation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1115-1125.
- Windschitl, P. D. (2002). Judging the accuracy of a likelihood judgment: The case of smoking risk. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15, 19-35.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Chambers, J. C. (2004). The dud-alternative effect in likelihood judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 198-215.
- Windschitl, P. D., Kruger, J., & Simms, E. N. (2003). The influence of egocentrism and focalism on people's optimism in competitions: When what affects us equally affects me more. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 389-408.
- Windschitl, P. D., Martin, R., & Flugstad, A. R. (2002). Context and the interpretation of likelihood information: The role of intergroup comparisons on perceived vulnerability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 742-755. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Windschitl, P. D., Smith, A. R., Rose, J. P., & Krizan, Z. (2010). The desirability bias in predictions: Going optimistic without leaving realism. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 111, 33-47.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Weber, E. U. (1999). The interpretation of "likely" depends on the context, but "70%" is 70%--right?: The influence of associative processes on perceived certainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1514-1533.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Wells, G. L. (1998). The alternative-outcomes effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1411-1423.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Wells, G. L. (1997). Behavioral consensus information affects people's inferences about population traits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 148-156.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Wells, G. L. (1996). Measuring psychological uncertainty: Verbal versus numeric methods. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2, 343-364.
- Windschitl, P. D., & Young, M. E. (2001). The influence of alternative outcomes on gut-level perceptions of certainty. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 85, 109-134.
- Windschitl, P. D., Young, M. E., & Jenson, M. E. (2002). Likelihood judgment based on previously observed outcomes: The alternative-outcomes effect in a learning paradigm. Memory and Cognition, 30, 469-477.
Courses Taught:
- Advanced Social Cognition
- Introduction to Social Psychology
- Laboratory in Psychology: Decision Making
- Personality and Social Psychology Seminar
- Social Cognition
- Social Judgment and Decision Processes
Paul Windschitl
Department of Psychology
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242
United States of America
- Phone: (319) 335-2435
- Fax: (319) 335-0191