I am happy to announce that, starting AU 2008, Kimberly Rios Morrison and Ray Pingree will be joining the School of Communication faculty as well as the COPS group.
Kim comes to us from Stanford, where she is completing her Ph.D. in the business school. Her research focuses on minority group influence and the conditions that prompt minority opinion expression in group settings. She also studies social identity, perceived threat from outgroups, and attitude change. Her training in organizational behavior and experimental social psychology will further enrichen an already exciting research culture. Here are a couple of her recent papers that might interest COPS members:
Morrison, K. R., & Miller, D. T. (in press). Distinguishing between silent and vocal minorities: Not all deviants feel marginal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF]
Morrison, K. R., & Ybarra, O. (2008). The effects of realistic threat and group identification on social dominance orientation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 156-163.
Ray is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and brings an interesting background as a computer scientist to his own theorizing about political deliberation. Some of his published work has attempted to identify ways to improve political deliberation through the use of online technologies. He has two recent publications in Communication Theory that you might be interested in:Pingree, R. J. (2007). How messages affect their senders: A more general model of message effects and implications for deliberation. Communication Theory. 17, 439-461.
Pingree, R. J. (2006). Decision structure and the problem of scale deliberation. Communication Theory, 16: 198-222.