Michael Sargent
Department of Psychology
4 Andrews Road (Pettengill Hall)
Bates College
Lewiston, Maine 04240
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (207) 786-6277
Fax: (207) 786-8338
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Most of my research focuses on the impact of race on judgment and decision making. For example, several researchers have found that objects that are not weapons are more often misclassified as weapons when they appear close in time or space to a Black person, rather than to a White person. Several of my recent experiments have been designed to investigate the conditions under which these kinds of effects occur. I am also interested in the mechanisms that drive these effects, particularly in the role of emotion as a mediating process.
In another line of work, my colleague Amy Douglass and I (along with students) are interested in the ways in which race affects legal decision making. We are particularly interested in the impact that race has on observers' motivation to attend to legally relevant information, such as alibi strength.
As implicit measures that promise to measure racial attitudes and stereotypes have grown in popularity, I have become increasingly interested in understanding their validity. Accordingly, I have conducted several studies on that topic and plan to continue in the future.
I am also interested in other, non-racial, aspects of judgment and decision making. For instance, I am interested in how cognitive style affects political judgments. Finally, a developing interest of mine is in the psychology of interpreting doctrine; what, specifically, are the processes involved in interpreting doctrine, such as constitutional law, and applying it to specific cases? What constitutes "bias" in such interpretation, and how, if at all, can such bias be minimized?
 Journal Articles:
- Sargent, M. J. (2004). Less thought, more punishment: Need for cognition predicts support for punitive responses to crime. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1485-1493.
- Sargent, M. J., & Bradfield, A. L. (2004). Race and information processing in criminal trials: Does the defendant’s race affect how the facts are evaluated? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 995-1008.
- Sargent, M. J., Kahan, T. A., & Mitchell, C. J. (in press) The mere acceptance effect: Can it influence responses on racial Implicit Association Tests? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Other Publications:
- Sargent, M. J. (2004). On the predictive utility of the Implicit Association Test: Current research and future directions. In J. Williams, W-N. Lee, & C. Haugtvedt (Eds.), Diversity in advertising: Broadening the scope of research directions (pp. 43-58). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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