Lia O’brien
Biographic Data
| ID | 178064 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lia O’brien |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lia |
| FAMILY NAME | O’brien |
| SIGNATURE | O’BRIEN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tulane University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1995-910X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Is That Really Sexual Harassment? The Effect of a Victim's Sexual Orientation on How People View a Sexual Harassment Claim
In three experiments and a meta-analysis, the present research examined how the sexual orientation of a victim affected the perceived legitimacy of sexual harassment claims. Working from prototype theory, the researchers hypothesized that because lesbian women deviate from the prototype of a sexual harassment victim, people would be less likely to perceive sexual harassment claims as legitimate when the victim was a lesbian woman as compared to a…
Does he see what she sees? The gender gap in perceptions of institutional sexism
Women are more likely than men to perceive institutional sexism. In the present study, we examined the gender gap in perceptions of a legal case in which a female plaintiff claims she was a victim of institutional gender discrimination by an employer. Participants were randomly assigned to receive information about institutional forms of sexism (or not) prior to learning the facts of the case. In addition, participants were randomly assigned to t…
Examining stereotypes in a dynamic social order: The stereotype content model in India
Stereotypes are tools of social perception that attribute a superficial uniformity to individuals within a social group, providing an instrument to assess individuals and groups. The stereotype content model (SCM) provides a framework for understanding these dynamics. SCM explores how groups are stereotyped on competence and warmth. This research utilizes the SCM to study India, a heterogenous society with diverse social groups. The purpose of th…
Attributions to Discrimination Against Black Victims in a Multiracial Society: Isolating the Effect of Perpetrator Group Membership
As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, interactions between Black people and other minority groups have become increasingly common. The present research examined how a perpetrator’s group membership affects judgments of employment discrimination against a Black victim. Four experiments (combined N = 1,016) tested predictions derived from the prototype model of discrimination. Participants reviewed a case file where a B…
How weird is the development of children’s gratitude in the United States? Cross-cultural comparisons
Our interest is in the development of gratitude as a moral virtue, and its variability across different cultural contexts. Given psychology's overreliance on samples collected from the United Sates, Western Europe, and Australasia, we contrasted patterns of age-related expressions of gratitude among a sample of U.S. 7- to 14-year-old children with those from same-age samples from Brazil, China, Russia, South Korea, and Turkey ( N = 2,540, 54.7% f…
The upside of acknowledging prejudiced behavior
Why are there so few ethnic minorities in ecology and evolutionary biology? Challenges to inclusion and the role of sense of belonging
African Americans and other ethnic minorities are severely underrepresented in both graduate education and among the professoriate in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB). In the present research, we take a social psychological approach to studying inclusion by examining interrelationships among challenges to inclusion, the sense of belonging, and interest in pursuing graduate education in EEB. We conducted a survey of African American (N = 360…
Attributions for Atheism: Perceptions that Atheism is a Choice are Associated with Prejudice against Atheists among Christians, but Not Jews or Nonbelievers
Is believing that atheism is a choice related to prejudice against atheists? The present research draws on attributional models of prejudice to examine the relationship between perceptions that atheism is a choice and anti-atheist prejudice among Christians, Jews, and nonbelievers. We hypothesized that Christians would be more likely than Jews (Sample 1 and 3) and nonbelievers (Samples 1, 2, and 3) to believe atheism is a choice. Further, we hypo…
Caste at work: Study of factors influencing attitudes toward affirmative action in India
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of caste identity in applied settings. The authors do this within the larger framework of affirmative action programs (AAPs) or “reservations” in India. The paper explores the interplay of a primordial identity like caste with the modern institutions representing equality – a context unique to India. Design/methodology/approach The paper reports the findings of two experimental studies…
Testing the effects of a role model intervention on women’s STEM outcomes
Empathy versus evidence: Does perspective-taking for a discrimination claimant bias judgments of institutional sexism
We examined whether perspective-taking increased people’s recognition of institutional sexism in cases where evidence was in favor or against a woman’s claim. In Experiment 1, participants who took the perspective of a woman claiming institutional sexism made greater attributions to discrimination than participants who remained objective, but only if legitimate evidence of discrimination was presented. Experiment 2 replicates and extends Experime…
An educational intervention to improve women’s academic STEM outcomes: Divergent effects on well-represented vs. underrepresented minority women
The present research demonstrates the importance of intersectional approaches to studying the experiences of women in STEM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
The Development of Gratitude in the United States
Gratitude develops over the course of childhood and adolescence. However, the processes involved are largely unknown. We propose that cultural context may play an important role in gratitude development. As a whole, this special issue examines cultural influences on the development of gratitude. In this article, we focus on the development of gratitude in the United States. According to Kağıtçıbaşı, the United States would demonstrate features of…
Improving Girls’ Sense of Fit in Science: Increasing the Impact of Role Models
A field experiment tested the effect of choosing a “favorite” role model on sense of fit in science among middle school girls. The girls participated in a 1-day science outreach event where they were exposed to multiple female role models. At the end of the event, participants were randomly assigned to choose and write about a favorite role model or to choose and write about their best friend. Girls in the role model choice condition experienced …
Gender equality, value violations, and prejudice toward Muslims
Why are people prejudiced toward Muslims? In this research, we used a value violation framework to predict that when people believe Muslims value gender equality less than reference groups, it creates a value violation that leads to prejudice. In Study 1, people believed that Muslims value gender equality less than Christians, and the more people believed that Muslims do not value gender equality, the more they reported prejudice toward Muslims. …
Pick your perspective: Racial group membership and judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination
How do people judge the intentions of a perpetrator and the harm experienced by a victim in cases of racial discrimination? How do these judgments influence attributions to discrimination? We examined these questions in 4 studies, predicting that Whites’ and Blacks’ judgments would reflect different group-based perspectives. Supporting our hypotheses, White authors describing an arrest denied intent and ignored harm relative to Black authors (Stu…
Methods for Studying the Virtue of Gratitude Cross-Culturally
Considering gratitude as a virtue, rather than a positive emotion, requires measures different from those more commonly used and which conflate gratitude with appreciation. We here describe those measures, explaining why they are appropriate to the study of gratitude as a virtue. We then discuss how each measure was coded for this special issue, the manner of recruitment of our participants across the seven research sites (Brazil, Guatemala, the …
Still Misused After All These Years? A Reevaluation of the Uses of Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Theory of Human Development
A theoretical review published in 2009 revealed that scholars who stated that their research was based on Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory of human development rarely used it appropriately. To what extent has the situation changed since then? We used the same methods to identify relevant articles as had been used in the 2009 article and found 20 publications whose authors explicitly claimed that Bronfenbrenner provided the theoretical f…
Understanding Perceptions of Racism in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: The Roles of System and Group Justification
Peepholes, Puppets, and Collage
Other| July 01 2015 Peepholes, Puppets, and Collage Doug Harvey, Doug Harvey DOUG HARVEY is an artist, writer, critic, independent curator, and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. His activities may be monitored online at www.dougharvey.blogspot.com and www.dougharvey.la. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Laurie O'Brien Laurie O'Brien LAURIE O'BRIEN, a multidisciplinary artist working with installa…
The Virtue of Gratitude: A Developmental and Cultural Approach
There has been a burgeoning interest in gratitude in adults, adolescents, and children, with most scholars examining the relations between variations in level of gratitude, treated largely as an emotional state, and measures of well-being. In this paper we explain why we think that gratitude should be defined as a virtue, as discussed by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists, rather than simply as an emotional state. Defining gratitude as a virtue ha…
The threat of sexism in a STEM educational setting: The moderating impacts of ethnicity and legitimacy beliefs on test performance
Confronting Sexism: Exploring the Effect of Nonsexist Credentials on the Costs of Target Confrontations
Ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation: An intersectional approach
Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation within an American university context. African American college women participated in STEM m…
Not the Sum of Its Parts: Decomposing Implicit Academic Stereotypes to Understand Sense of Fit in Math and English
The Social Psychology of Stigma
This chapter addresses the psychological effects of social stigma. Stigma directly affects the stigmatized via mechanisms of discrimination, expectancy confirmation, and automatic stereotype activation, and indirectly via threats to personal and social identity. We review and organize recent theory and empirical research within an identity threat model of stigma. This model posits that situational cues, collective representations of one's stigma …
Social norms and the expression and suppression of prejudice: The struggle for internalization
The authors studied social norms and prejudice using M. Sherif and C. W. Sherif's (1953) group norm theory of attitudes. In 7 studies (N = 1,504), social norms were measured and manipulated to examine their effects on prejudice; both normatively proscribed and normatively prescribed forms of prejudice were included. The public expression of prejudice toward 105 social groups was very highly correlated with social approval of that expression. Part…
The ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for social justice
The effect of self-affirmation on perception of racism
Perceived discrimination as worldview threat or worldview confirmation: Implications for self-esteem
In 3 studies, the authors tested the hypothesis that discrimination targets' worldview moderates the impact of perceived discrimination on self-esteem among devalued groups. In Study 1, perceiving discrimination against the ingroup was negatively associated with self-esteem among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview (e.g., believed that individuals of any group can get ahead in America and that success stems from hard work) but w…
Ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation: An intersectional approach
Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation within an American university context. African American college women participated in STEM m…
Still Misused After All These Years? A Reevaluation of the Uses of Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Theory of Human Development
A theoretical review published in 2009 revealed that scholars who stated that their research was based on Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory of human development rarely used it appropriately. To what extent has the situation changed since then? We used the same methods to identify relevant articles as had been used in the 2009 article and found 20 publications whose authors explicitly claimed that Bronfenbrenner provided the theoretical f…
Adolescents Prefer More Immediate Rewards When in the Presence of their Peers
Adolescents take more risks in the presence of their peers, but the mechanism through which peer presence affects risky decision‐making is unknown. We propose that the presence of peers increases the salience of the immediate rewards of a risky choice. The current study examined the effect of peer presence on reward sensitivity in a sample of 100 late adolescents ages 18 through 20 ( M= 18.5) using a delay discounting task, which assesses an indi…
How status and stereotypes impact attributions to discrimination: The stereotype-asymmetry hypothesis
Understanding White Americans' Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina-Related Events
The present research used a longitudinal design to examine perceptions of racism in Katrina-related events among a sample of White American college students returning to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The results suggest that the meritocracy beliefs prevalent in White American culture led participants to conceptualize racism primarily in terms of individual racial prejudices rather than in terms of institutional practices that harm ethn…
Responding to sex-based discrimination: Gender differences in perceived discrimination and implications for legal decision making
The present studies examine responses to individual and institutional sex-based discrimination and how these responses vary as a function of the perceiver’s gender. In Study 1A, women perceived more sexism than men and the magnitude of the gender gap was significantly larger for institutional sexism as compared to individual sexism. Study 1B provided validation for the measures of perceptions of individual and institutional sexism. In Study 2, pa…
Methods for Studying the Virtue of Gratitude Cross-Culturally
Considering gratitude as a virtue, rather than a positive emotion, requires measures different from those more commonly used and which conflate gratitude with appreciation. We here describe those measures, explaining why they are appropriate to the study of gratitude as a virtue. We then discuss how each measure was coded for this special issue, the manner of recruitment of our participants across the seven research sites (Brazil, Guatemala, the …
Gender equality, value violations, and prejudice toward Muslims
Why are people prejudiced toward Muslims? In this research, we used a value violation framework to predict that when people believe Muslims value gender equality less than reference groups, it creates a value violation that leads to prejudice. In Study 1, people believed that Muslims value gender equality less than Christians, and the more people believed that Muslims do not value gender equality, the more they reported prejudice toward Muslims. …
Not the Sum of Its Parts: Decomposing Implicit Academic Stereotypes to Understand Sense of Fit in Math and English
Pick your perspective: Racial group membership and judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination
How do people judge the intentions of a perpetrator and the harm experienced by a victim in cases of racial discrimination? How do these judgments influence attributions to discrimination? We examined these questions in 4 studies, predicting that Whites’ and Blacks’ judgments would reflect different group-based perspectives. Supporting our hypotheses, White authors describing an arrest denied intent and ignored harm relative to Black authors (Stu…
Evaluations of White American versus Black American discrimination claimants' political views and prejudicial attitudes
Why did you choose that person over me? Ingroup rejection and attributions to discrimination
How weird is the development of children’s gratitude in the United States? Cross-cultural comparisons
Our interest is in the development of gratitude as a moral virtue, and its variability across different cultural contexts. Given psychology's overreliance on samples collected from the United Sates, Western Europe, and Australasia, we contrasted patterns of age-related expressions of gratitude among a sample of U.S. 7- to 14-year-old children with those from same-age samples from Brazil, China, Russia, South Korea, and Turkey ( N = 2,540, 54.7% f…
System-justifying ideologies and academic outcomes among first-year Latino college students
The present study examines the relationship between system-justifying ideologies and academic outcomes among 78 first-year Latino college students (21 men, 57 women, mean age = 18.1 years) attending a moderately selective West Coast university. Endorsement of system-justifying ideologies was negatively associated with grade point average (GPA); however it was positively associated with feelings of belonging at the university. In addition, system-…
Testing the effects of a role model intervention on women’s STEM outcomes
Why are there so few ethnic minorities in ecology and evolutionary biology? Challenges to inclusion and the role of sense of belonging
African Americans and other ethnic minorities are severely underrepresented in both graduate education and among the professoriate in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB). In the present research, we take a social psychological approach to studying inclusion by examining interrelationships among challenges to inclusion, the sense of belonging, and interest in pursuing graduate education in EEB. We conducted a survey of African American (N = 360…
An educational intervention to improve women’s academic STEM outcomes: Divergent effects on well-represented vs. underrepresented minority women
The present research demonstrates the importance of intersectional approaches to studying the experiences of women in STEM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Perceiving Self-Interest: Power, Ideology, and Maintenance of the Status Quo
The Development of Gratitude in the United States
Gratitude develops over the course of childhood and adolescence. However, the processes involved are largely unknown. We propose that cultural context may play an important role in gratitude development. As a whole, this special issue examines cultural influences on the development of gratitude. In this article, we focus on the development of gratitude in the United States. According to Kağıtçıbaşı, the United States would demonstrate features of…
Understanding Perceptions of Racism in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: The Roles of System and Group Justification
Hospital Almoning: Portrait of the First Decade
This contribution to the Seminar was not so much a paper as a Picture Show of 120 slides selected to illustrate the beginnings and growth of medical social work (called hospital almoning) in Victoria. The slides were projected in fairly quick succession accompanied by an explanatory and necessarily interpretive commentary. They included a few photographs from the 1920s, and even several from the years before the First World War when medical socia…
"A Bold Plunge into the Sea of Values": The Career of Dr. Richard Cabot
IN 1894 Richard Clarke Cabot of Boston wrote in his personal notebook, feel . . . that not to do something really great will be for me to have failed entirely. I never heard or read of anyone with such advantages.' Just two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, Cabot was to become internationally known as the author of the first book on hematology written in English. When his interest shifted to clinical medicine, he acquired a formidable repu…
Social norms and the expression and suppression of prejudice: The struggle for internalization
The authors studied social norms and prejudice using M. Sherif and C. W. Sherif's (1953) group norm theory of attitudes. In 7 studies (N = 1,504), social norms were measured and manipulated to examine their effects on prejudice; both normatively proscribed and normatively prescribed forms of prejudice were included. The public expression of prejudice toward 105 social groups was very highly correlated with social approval of that expression. Part…
Stereotype Threat and Arousal: Effects on Women's Math Performance
Theories of arousal suggest that arousal should decrease performance on difficult tasks and increase performance on easy tasks. An experiment tested the hypothesis that the effects of stereotype threat on performance are due to heightened arousal. The authors hypothesized that telling participants that a math test they are about to take is known to have gender differences would cause stereotype threat in women but not in men. In the experiment, e…
The Social Psychology of Stigma
This chapter addresses the psychological effects of social stigma. Stigma directly affects the stigmatized via mechanisms of discrimination, expectancy confirmation, and automatic stereotype activation, and indirectly via threats to personal and social identity. We review and organize recent theory and empirical research within an identity threat model of stigma. This model posits that situational cues, collective representations of one's stigma …
System-Justifying Beliefs and Psychological Well-Being: The Roles of Group Status and Identity
This research examined the relationship between endorsing system-justifying beliefs and psychological well-being among individuals fromethnic groups that vary in social status. Systemjustifying beliefs are beliefs that imply that status in society is fair, deserved, and merited; examples of system-justifying beliefs in the United States include the beliefs that hard work pays off and that anyone can get ahead regardless of their group membership.…
The effect of self-affirmation on perception of racism
Perceiving Self-Interest: Power, Ideology, and Maintenance of the Status Quo
How status and stereotypes impact attributions to discrimination: The stereotype-asymmetry hypothesis
Perceived discrimination as worldview threat or worldview confirmation: Implications for self-esteem
In 3 studies, the authors tested the hypothesis that discrimination targets' worldview moderates the impact of perceived discrimination on self-esteem among devalued groups. In Study 1, perceiving discrimination against the ingroup was negatively associated with self-esteem among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview (e.g., believed that individuals of any group can get ahead in America and that success stems from hard work) but w…
Age Differences in Future Orientation and Delay Discounting
Age differences in future orientation are examined in a sample of 935 individuals between 10 and 30 years using a delay discounting task as well as a new self-report measure. Younger adolescents consistently demonstrate a weaker orientation to the future than do individuals aged 16 and older, as reflected in their greater willingness to accept a smaller reward delivered sooner than a larger one that is delayed, and in their characterizations of t…
Understanding White Americans' Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina-Related Events
The present research used a longitudinal design to examine perceptions of racism in Katrina-related events among a sample of White American college students returning to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The results suggest that the meritocracy beliefs prevalent in White American culture led participants to conceptualize racism primarily in terms of individual racial prejudices rather than in terms of institutional practices that harm ethn…
The ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for social justice
Peers increase adolescent risk taking by enhancing activity in the brain’s reward circuitry
The presence of peers increases risk taking among adolescents but not adults. We posited that the presence of peers may promote adolescent risk taking by sensitizing brain regions associated with the anticipation of potential rewards. Using fMRI, we measured brain activity in adolescents, young adults, and adults as they made decisions in a simulated driving task. Participants completed one task block while alone, and one block while their perfor…
Responding to sex-based discrimination: Gender differences in perceived discrimination and implications for legal decision making
The present studies examine responses to individual and institutional sex-based discrimination and how these responses vary as a function of the perceiver’s gender. In Study 1A, women perceived more sexism than men and the magnitude of the gender gap was significantly larger for institutional sexism as compared to individual sexism. Study 1B provided validation for the measures of perceptions of individual and institutional sexism. In Study 2, pa…
System-justifying ideologies and academic outcomes among first-year Latino college students
The present study examines the relationship between system-justifying ideologies and academic outcomes among 78 first-year Latino college students (21 men, 57 women, mean age = 18.1 years) attending a moderately selective West Coast university. Endorsement of system-justifying ideologies was negatively associated with grade point average (GPA); however it was positively associated with feelings of belonging at the university. In addition, system-…
Adolescents Prefer More Immediate Rewards When in the Presence of their Peers
Adolescents take more risks in the presence of their peers, but the mechanism through which peer presence affects risky decision‐making is unknown. We propose that the presence of peers increases the salience of the immediate rewards of a risky choice. The current study examined the effect of peer presence on reward sensitivity in a sample of 100 late adolescents ages 18 through 20 ( M= 18.5) using a delay discounting task, which assesses an indi…
Evaluations of White American versus Black American discrimination claimants' political views and prejudicial attitudes
Why did you choose that person over me? Ingroup rejection and attributions to discrimination
Ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation: An intersectional approach
Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation within an American university context. African American college women participated in STEM m…
Not the Sum of Its Parts: Decomposing Implicit Academic Stereotypes to Understand Sense of Fit in Math and English
Peepholes, Puppets, and Collage
Other| July 01 2015 Peepholes, Puppets, and Collage Doug Harvey, Doug Harvey DOUG HARVEY is an artist, writer, critic, independent curator, and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. His activities may be monitored online at www.dougharvey.blogspot.com and www.dougharvey.la. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Laurie O'Brien Laurie O'Brien LAURIE O'BRIEN, a multidisciplinary artist working with installa…
The Virtue of Gratitude: A Developmental and Cultural Approach
There has been a burgeoning interest in gratitude in adults, adolescents, and children, with most scholars examining the relations between variations in level of gratitude, treated largely as an emotional state, and measures of well-being. In this paper we explain why we think that gratitude should be defined as a virtue, as discussed by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists, rather than simply as an emotional state. Defining gratitude as a virtue ha…
The threat of sexism in a STEM educational setting: The moderating impacts of ethnicity and legitimacy beliefs on test performance
Confronting Sexism: Exploring the Effect of Nonsexist Credentials on the Costs of Target Confrontations
Psychology (40 works) · Social Psychology (37 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (29 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Developmental psychology (13 works) · Perception (13 works) · Law (12 works)