William A Cunningham
Biographic Data
| ID | 1659989 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William A Cunningham |
| GIVEN NAMES | William A |
| FAMILY NAME | Cunningham |
| SIGNATURE | CUNNINGHAM W A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7063-5859 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The self as an image: Appearance and belief in visual representations of one's own face
Self-representations are central to cognition, yet their internal structure and visual fidelity remain poorly understood. We combined behavioral and computational approaches to characterize self-face representations from perception and memory by linking similarity judgments, model alignment, and image reconstruction. Participants provided similarity judgments for self, familiar, and unfamiliar faces, which were compared against the representation…
Decoupling the Conflicting Evaluative Meanings in Automatically Activated Race-Based Associations
Implicit measures of attitudes have classically focused on the association between a social group and generalized valence, but debate exists surrounding how these associations arise and what they can tell us about beliefs and attitudes. Here, we suggest that representations of oppression, which relate positively to implicitly measured prejudice but negatively to explicitly measured prejudice, can serve to decrease the predictive validity of impli…
Echoes of Culture: Relationships of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes With Contemporary English, Historical English, and 53 Non-English Languages
Attitudes are intertwined with culture and language. But to what extent? Emerging perspectives in attitude research suggest that cultural representations in language are more related to implicitly measured (vs. explicitly measured) attitudes, and that such relationships persist across history and diverse languages. We offer a comprehensive test of these ideas by correlating (a) attitudes toward 55 topics (e.g., Rich/Poor, Dogs/Cats, Love/Money) f…
Camouflaging, internalized stigma, and mental health in the general population
BACKGROUND: Camouflaging, the strategies that some autistic people use to hide their differences, has been hypothesized to trigger mental health ramifications. Camouflaging might reflect ubiquitous impression management experiences that are not unique to autistic people and similarly impact the mental health of non-autistic people. AIMS: We first examined whether individuals in the general population camouflage and manage impressions while experi…
Shifting evaluative construal: Common and distinct neural components of moral, pragmatic, and hedonic evaluations
People generate evaluations of different attitude objects based on their goals and aspects of the social context. Prior research suggests that people can shift between at least three types of evaluations to judge whether something is good or bad: pragmatic (how costly or beneficial it is), moral (whether it is aligned with moral norms), and hedonic (whether it feels good; Van Bavel et al., 2012). The current research examined the neurocognitive c…
If not me then we: Goal tradeoffs in decision-making for the self, ingroup, and outgroup
Navigating the social world requires individuals to balance multiple goals, including the drives to improve one's own outcomes, aid ingroup members, and help or hurt outgroup members. While self-interest and intergroup bias are both well-established motivational phenomena, less is known about how these goals may interact. Here we examine the nature of goal tradeoffs in intergroup decision-making using a novel task in which participants simultaneo…
AI and the transformation of social science research
Careful bias management and data fidelity are key
The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike
We investigated whether any differences in the psychological conceptualization of hate and dislike were simply a matter of degree of negativity (i.e., hate falls on the end of the continuum of dislike) or also morality (i.e., hate is imbued with distinct moral components that distinguish it from dislike). In three lab studies in Canada and the United States, participants reported disliked and hated attitude objects and rated each on dimensions in…
Not Who You Are, But Who You Are With: Re-examining Women’s Less Satisfying Sexual Debuts
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during …
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to Covid-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social…
Can the Implicit Association Test Serve as a Valid Measure of Automatic Cognition? A Response to Schimmack (2021)
Much of human thought, feeling, and behavior unfolds automatically. Indirect measures of cognition capture such processes by observing responding under corresponding conditions (e.g., lack of intention or control). The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one such measure. The IAT indexes the strength of association between categories such as “planes” and “trains” and attributes such as “fast” and “slow” by comparing response latencies across two s…
The rise of affectivism
Parts of me: Identity-relevance moderates self-prioritization
Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results
To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete 1 version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across diff…
The Uncertainty Paradox: Perceived Threat Moderates the Effect of Uncertainty on Political Tolerance
People respond to dissimilar political beliefs in a variety of ways, ranging from openness and acceptance to closed‐mindedness and intolerance. While there is reason to believe that uncertainty may influence political tolerance, the direction of this influence remains unclear. We propose that threat moderates the effect of uncertainty on tolerance; when safe, uncertainty leads to greater tolerance, yet when threatened, uncertainty leads to reduce…
Motivated social memory: Belonging needs moderate the own-group bias in face recognition
Mapping emotions through time: How affective trajectories inform the language of emotion
The words used to describe emotions can provide insight into the basic processes that contribute to emotional experience. We propose that emotions arise partly from interacting evaluations of one's current affective state, previous affective state, predictions for how these may change in the future, and the experienced outcomes following these predictions. These states can be represented and inferred from neural systems that encode shifts in outc…
Feeling stuck in the present? Mania proneness and history associated with present-oriented time perspective
Humans have the ability to mentally time travel through past, present, and future. But can a disruption in emotion characteristic of emotional disorders cause this ability to unwind, leaving people "stuck" in the present emotional moment? Two studies are presented that examine emotional time-perspective in a disorder (mania) characterized by present-oriented tendencies, including impulsivity and emotion dysregulation. In Study 1, associations wer…
A social neuroscience approach to self and social categorisation: A new look at an old issue
We take a social neuroscience approach to self and social categorisation in which the current self-categorisation(s) is constructed from relatively stable identity representations stored in memory (such as the significance of one's social identity) through iterative and interactive perceptual and evaluative processing. This approach describes these processes across multiple levels of analysis, linking the effects of self-categorisation and social…
The Neural Substrates of In-Group Bias: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation
Classic minimal-group studies found that people arbitrarily assigned to a novel group quickly display a range of perceptual, affective, and behavioral in-group biases. We randomly assigned participants to a mixed-race team and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in processing novel in-group and out-group members independently of preexisting attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity. Whereas previous research…
The Iterative Reprocessing Model: A Multilevel Framework for Attitudes and Evaluation
Dual–process models of attitudes highlight the fact that evaluative processes are complex and multifaceted. Nevertheless, many of these models typically neglect important interactions among processes that can contribute to an evaluation. In this article, we propose a multilevel model informed by neuroscience in which current evaluations are constructed from relatively stable attitude representations through the iterative reprocessing of informati…
Humor appreciation and latency of comprehension
The relation between humor appreciation and comprehension difficulty has been described as an inverted U function. That is, when a joke is too easy or too hard to understand it will be less funny than a joke of intermediate difficulty. Humor appreciation might, however, be a kind of expert skill. Then the easier it is to get a joke for the experienced language user the funnier the joke will be. Two experiments found the relation between the laten…
Separable Neural Components in the Processing of Black and White Faces
In a study of the neural components of automatic and controlled social evaluation, White participants viewed Black and White faces during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. When the faces were presented for 30 ms, activation in the amygdala-a brain region associated with emotion-was greater for Black than for White faces. When the faces were presented for 525 ms, this difference was significantly reduced, and regions of frontal …
Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Ideologies of Prejudice
Two studies investigated relationships among individual differences in implicit and explicit prejudice, right-wing ideology, and rigidity in thinking. The first study examined these relationships focusing on White Americans' prejudice toward Black Americans. The second study provided the first test of implicit ethnocentrism and its relationship to explicit ethnocentrism by studying the relationship between attitudes toward five social groups. Fac…
Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Ideologies of Prejudice
Two studies investigated relationships among individual differences in implicit and explicit prejudice, right-wing ideology, and rigidity in thinking. The first study examined these relationships focusing on White Americans' prejudice toward Black Americans. The second study provided the first test of implicit ethnocentrism and its relationship to explicit ethnocentrism by studying the relationship between attitudes toward five social groups. Fac…
The Uncertainty Paradox: Perceived Threat Moderates the Effect of Uncertainty on Political Tolerance
People respond to dissimilar political beliefs in a variety of ways, ranging from openness and acceptance to closed‐mindedness and intolerance. While there is reason to believe that uncertainty may influence political tolerance, the direction of this influence remains unclear. We propose that threat moderates the effect of uncertainty on tolerance; when safe, uncertainty leads to greater tolerance, yet when threatened, uncertainty leads to reduce…
Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results
To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete 1 version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across diff…
The rise of affectivism
Motivated social memory: Belonging needs moderate the own-group bias in face recognition
Humor appreciation and latency of comprehension
The relation between humor appreciation and comprehension difficulty has been described as an inverted U function. That is, when a joke is too easy or too hard to understand it will be less funny than a joke of intermediate difficulty. Humor appreciation might, however, be a kind of expert skill. Then the easier it is to get a joke for the experienced language user the funnier the joke will be. Two experiments found the relation between the laten…
Neural components of social evaluation
Evaluative responses appear to involve 2 seemingly distinct sets of processes: those that are automatically activated and others that are more consciously controlled. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors investigated the brain systems associated with automatic and controlled evaluative processing. Participants made either evaluative (good-bad) or nonevaluative (past-present) judgments about famous names. Greater amygdala activ…
The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike
We investigated whether any differences in the psychological conceptualization of hate and dislike were simply a matter of degree of negativity (i.e., hate falls on the end of the continuum of dislike) or also morality (i.e., hate is imbued with distinct moral components that distinguish it from dislike). In three lab studies in Canada and the United States, participants reported disliked and hated attitude objects and rated each on dimensions in…
If not me then we: Goal tradeoffs in decision-making for the self, ingroup, and outgroup
Navigating the social world requires individuals to balance multiple goals, including the drives to improve one's own outcomes, aid ingroup members, and help or hurt outgroup members. While self-interest and intergroup bias are both well-established motivational phenomena, less is known about how these goals may interact. Here we examine the nature of goal tradeoffs in intergroup decision-making using a novel task in which participants simultaneo…
Implicit Attitude Measures: Consistency, Stability, and Convergent Validity
In recent years, several techniques have been developed to measure implicit social cognition. Despite their increased use, little attention has been devoted to their reliability and validity. This article undertakes a direct assessment of the interitem consistency, stability, and convergent validity of some implicit attitude measures. Attitudes toward blacks and whites were measured on four separate occasions, each 2 weeks apart, using three rela…
To Parcel or Not to Parcel: Exploring the Question, Weighing the Merits
We examine the controversial practice of using parcels of items as manifest variables in structural equation modeling (SEM) procedures. After detailing arguments pro and con, we conclude that the unconsidered use of parcels is never warranted, while, at the same time, the considered use of parcels cannot be dismissed out of hand. In large part, the decision to parcel or not depends on one's philosophical stance regarding scientific inquiry (e.g.,…
Neural components of social evaluation
Evaluative responses appear to involve 2 seemingly distinct sets of processes: those that are automatically activated and others that are more consciously controlled. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors investigated the brain systems associated with automatic and controlled evaluative processing. Participants made either evaluative (good-bad) or nonevaluative (past-present) judgments about famous names. Greater amygdala activ…
Separable Neural Components in the Processing of Black and White Faces
In a study of the neural components of automatic and controlled social evaluation, White participants viewed Black and White faces during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. When the faces were presented for 30 ms, activation in the amygdala-a brain region associated with emotion-was greater for Black than for White faces. When the faces were presented for 525 ms, this difference was significantly reduced, and regions of frontal …
Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Ideologies of Prejudice
Two studies investigated relationships among individual differences in implicit and explicit prejudice, right-wing ideology, and rigidity in thinking. The first study examined these relationships focusing on White Americans' prejudice toward Black Americans. The second study provided the first test of implicit ethnocentrism and its relationship to explicit ethnocentrism by studying the relationship between attitudes toward five social groups. Fac…
Humor appreciation and latency of comprehension
The relation between humor appreciation and comprehension difficulty has been described as an inverted U function. That is, when a joke is too easy or too hard to understand it will be less funny than a joke of intermediate difficulty. Humor appreciation might, however, be a kind of expert skill. Then the easier it is to get a joke for the experienced language user the funnier the joke will be. Two experiments found the relation between the laten…
The Iterative Reprocessing Model: A Multilevel Framework for Attitudes and Evaluation
Dual–process models of attitudes highlight the fact that evaluative processes are complex and multifaceted. Nevertheless, many of these models typically neglect important interactions among processes that can contribute to an evaluation. In this article, we propose a multilevel model informed by neuroscience in which current evaluations are constructed from relatively stable attitude representations through the iterative reprocessing of informati…
The Neural Substrates of In-Group Bias: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation
Classic minimal-group studies found that people arbitrarily assigned to a novel group quickly display a range of perceptual, affective, and behavioral in-group biases. We randomly assigned participants to a mixed-race team and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in processing novel in-group and out-group members independently of preexisting attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity. Whereas previous research…
A social neuroscience approach to self and social categorisation: A new look at an old issue
We take a social neuroscience approach to self and social categorisation in which the current self-categorisation(s) is constructed from relatively stable identity representations stored in memory (such as the significance of one's social identity) through iterative and interactive perceptual and evaluative processing. This approach describes these processes across multiple levels of analysis, linking the effects of self-categorisation and social…
Mapping emotions through time: How affective trajectories inform the language of emotion
The words used to describe emotions can provide insight into the basic processes that contribute to emotional experience. We propose that emotions arise partly from interacting evaluations of one's current affective state, previous affective state, predictions for how these may change in the future, and the experienced outcomes following these predictions. These states can be represented and inferred from neural systems that encode shifts in outc…
Feeling stuck in the present? Mania proneness and history associated with present-oriented time perspective
Humans have the ability to mentally time travel through past, present, and future. But can a disruption in emotion characteristic of emotional disorders cause this ability to unwind, leaving people "stuck" in the present emotional moment? Two studies are presented that examine emotional time-perspective in a disorder (mania) characterized by present-oriented tendencies, including impulsivity and emotion dysregulation. In Study 1, associations wer…
Motivated social memory: Belonging needs moderate the own-group bias in face recognition
The Uncertainty Paradox: Perceived Threat Moderates the Effect of Uncertainty on Political Tolerance
People respond to dissimilar political beliefs in a variety of ways, ranging from openness and acceptance to closed‐mindedness and intolerance. While there is reason to believe that uncertainty may influence political tolerance, the direction of this influence remains unclear. We propose that threat moderates the effect of uncertainty on tolerance; when safe, uncertainty leads to greater tolerance, yet when threatened, uncertainty leads to reduce…
Parts of me: Identity-relevance moderates self-prioritization
Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results
To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete 1 version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across diff…
Can the Implicit Association Test Serve as a Valid Measure of Automatic Cognition? A Response to Schimmack (2021)
Much of human thought, feeling, and behavior unfolds automatically. Indirect measures of cognition capture such processes by observing responding under corresponding conditions (e.g., lack of intention or control). The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one such measure. The IAT indexes the strength of association between categories such as “planes” and “trains” and attributes such as “fast” and “slow” by comparing response latencies across two s…
The rise of affectivism
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during …
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to Covid-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social…
AI and the transformation of social science research
Careful bias management and data fidelity are key
The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike
We investigated whether any differences in the psychological conceptualization of hate and dislike were simply a matter of degree of negativity (i.e., hate falls on the end of the continuum of dislike) or also morality (i.e., hate is imbued with distinct moral components that distinguish it from dislike). In three lab studies in Canada and the United States, participants reported disliked and hated attitude objects and rated each on dimensions in…
Not Who You Are, But Who You Are With: Re-examining Women’s Less Satisfying Sexual Debuts
Decoupling the Conflicting Evaluative Meanings in Automatically Activated Race-Based Associations
Implicit measures of attitudes have classically focused on the association between a social group and generalized valence, but debate exists surrounding how these associations arise and what they can tell us about beliefs and attitudes. Here, we suggest that representations of oppression, which relate positively to implicitly measured prejudice but negatively to explicitly measured prejudice, can serve to decrease the predictive validity of impli…
Echoes of Culture: Relationships of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes With Contemporary English, Historical English, and 53 Non-English Languages
Attitudes are intertwined with culture and language. But to what extent? Emerging perspectives in attitude research suggest that cultural representations in language are more related to implicitly measured (vs. explicitly measured) attitudes, and that such relationships persist across history and diverse languages. We offer a comprehensive test of these ideas by correlating (a) attitudes toward 55 topics (e.g., Rich/Poor, Dogs/Cats, Love/Money) f…
Camouflaging, internalized stigma, and mental health in the general population
BACKGROUND: Camouflaging, the strategies that some autistic people use to hide their differences, has been hypothesized to trigger mental health ramifications. Camouflaging might reflect ubiquitous impression management experiences that are not unique to autistic people and similarly impact the mental health of non-autistic people. AIMS: We first examined whether individuals in the general population camouflage and manage impressions while experi…
Psychology (24 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (16 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (6 works)