Emily Balcetis

Institution New York University Current Position Assistant Professor Highest Degree Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from Cornell University, 2006 Research Interests Attribution Judgment/Decision Making Motivation/Goal Setting Person Perception Self/Identity Social Cognition Laboratory SPAM Lab: Social Perception Action and Motivation Laboratory Courses Taught Automaticity in Social Cognition Current Social Cognition Introduction to Psychology Motivation Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology Social Psychology of Visual Perception   Emily Balcetis Department of Psychology New York University 6 Washington Place New York, New York 10003 United States Phone: 212.998.3998 MOTIVATED VISUAL PERCEPTION People assume perceptions of the world are veridical representations of reality. Much research, however, questions this supposition and instead suggests the vantage is “cloudy” at best. The way people perceive their environment is both selective and malleable. My research investigates how broader contexts—ones established by such social psychological factors as motivations, individual differences, and goals—influence perception. MOTIVATIONAL BIASES in SOCIAL JUDGMENT We explore how motives to maintain favorable self-views influence the ways in which people come to make judgments about others and themselves. In addition, we explore how motives that change as a result of cultural ties and backgrounds lead to different patterns of self and social judgment. AWARDS Society for Experimental and Social Psychology 2006 Dissertation Award, awarded October of 2007 for "Motivated Visual Perception: How We See What We Want to See" Books: Balcetis, E., & Lassiter, G. D. (eds.) (2010). The social psychology of visual perception. New York, NY, Psychology Press. Journal Articles: Balcetis, E., & Cole, S. (in press). Motivated perception in the service of self-deception. Invited chapter in C. Sedikides & M. Alicke (Eds.) Handbook of self-enhancement and self-protection. New York: Guilford Press. Balcetis, E., & Dale, R. (2007). Conceptual set as a top-down constraint on visual object identification. Perception, 36(4), 581-595. Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2008). A mile in moccasins: How situational experience diminishes dispositionism in social inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(1), 102-114. Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2007). Cognitive dissonance reduction and perception of the physical world. Psychological Science, 917-921. Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2006). See what you want to see: Motivational influences on visual perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 612-625. Balcetis, E., Dunning, D., & Miller, R. (2008). Do collectivists “know themselves” better than individualists?: Cross-cultural studies of the “holier than thou” phenomenon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1252-1267. Caruso, E., Mead, N., & Balcetis, E. (2009). Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 20168-20173. Other Publications: Balcetis, E, & Dunning, D (2010). Wishful seeing: Desired objects are seen as closer. Psychological Science, 21, 147-152. Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2010). Wishful seeing: Motivational influences on visual perception of the physical environment. In E. Balcetis, & G. D. Lassiter (Eds.), The social psychology of visual perception. New York, NY, Psychology Press. Balcetis, E., & Dunning, D. (2005). Judging for two: Some connectionist proposals for how the self informs and constrains social judgment. In M. Alice, D. Dunning, & J. Krueger (Eds.), Self and social judgment. New York: Psychology Press.

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