Research in the Guilty Pleasures & Ambivalence (GPA) Lab examines how people think, feel, and behave when experiencing ambivalence and internal conflict. Although our attitudes and emotions are extremely useful for navigating our social worlds, our opinions and feelings are often not black-and-white or point solely in one direction (i.e., positive or negative), resulting in internal conflict—what is the right thing to do, feel, or believe when one can see more than one side of an issue? To this end, research in the GPA lab draws on theory from literatures on attitudes and persuasion, emotion, the self, and cross-cultural psychology to investigate the antecedents of feeling conflicted and how people navigate such ambivalent experiences.
Current questions being explored in the lab include:
1.) What are the consequences of sharing one’s guilty pleasure with close others as it relates to fostering or hindering belonging and closeness?
2.) Do different types of common guilty pleasures (e.g., food, watching trashy reality TV) elicit different emotional and cognitive reactions?
3.) What are the consequences of indulging in one’s guilty pleasure alone, in private as it relates to self-evaluation and self-concept clarity?
4.) How do individual differences in self-concept content (e.g., contingencies of self-worth) predict what type of activities someone considers a guilty pleasure?
5.) Does cultural tightness-looseness influence the extent to which people moralize their attitudes?