Word cloud of paper abstracts; generated by Wordle.com
Research
My research is in two broad areas. Of course, all of this work has been done in collaboration with others and full citations are listed below.
My first research area relates to motivated defence of the status quo and worldviews, where I have generally drawn upon the theoretical perspectives of system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994) and compensatory control theory (Kay et al., 2008). In particular, I have investigated how pressing psychological motivations in individuals shape beliefs about organizations (e.g., companies, governments; Friesen, Kay, Eibach, & Galinsky, 2014) and group stereotypes (e.g., immigrants, women; Kay et al., 2009). This includes a SSHRC funded project, along with Dr. Danielle Gaucher, investigating how stereotypes and system justification affect beliefs about immigrants, and how to promote belongingness among newcomers to Canada (Gaucher, Friesen, Neufeld, & Esses, 2018). In other research on motivated status quo defence, we have also investigated how subtle cues, such as systematic biases in language or stereotypes, reinforce the status quo in male-dominated occupations (Gaucher, Friesen, & Kay, 2011). I have also found that unfalsifiable or untestable beliefs allow people to defend their cherished political and religious views, and express those views with more zeal (Friesen, Campbell, & Kay, 2015).
My second area of research is within social vision and intergroup relations. Here I use eye-tracking and other social-cognitive methods to investigate how visual attention differs when viewing someone from another race, and the downstream consequences of these biases for impression formation or identity recognition (e.g., Friesen et al., 2019; Vingilis-Jaremko, Kawakami, & Friesen, 2020). Moreover, I also study how top-down motivations, such as needs to trust or connect with people, influence those attentional processes and impression formation (Kawakami, Friesen, et al., 2021). In progress work has also examined how people process their physical environments in order to determine belonging and fit within those spaces.
Journal Publications
If you would like a pdf of any of these papers, please email me.
Wood, J., Forest, A., Friesen, J. P., Murray, S., Holmes, J., & McNulty, J. (2023). Why self-esteem matters in romantic relationships. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3, 27-41.
Kawakami, K., Vingilis-Jaremko, L., Friesen, J. P., Meyers, C., & Fang, Xia (2022). Impact of similarity on recognition of faces of Black and White targets. British Journal of Psychology, 113, 1079-1099
Kawakami, K., Friesen, J. P., & Fang, Xia (2022). Perceiving ingroup and outgroup faces within and across nations. British Journal of Psychology, 113, 551-574.
Kawakami, K., Friesen, J. P., Williams, A., Vingilis-Jaremko, L., Sidhu, D. M., Rodriguez-Bailón, R., Cañadas, E., & Hugenberg, K. (2021). Impact of perceived interpersonal similarity on attention to the eyes of same-race and other-race faces. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6, 68:1-16.
Van Doesum, N., Murphy, R., …Friesen, J. P., et al. (2021). Social mindfulness across the globe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118, e2023846118.
Vingilis-Jaremko, L., Kawakami, K., & Friesen, J. P. (2020). Other-groups bias effects: Recognizing majority and minority outgroup faces. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11, 908-916.
Karmali, F., Kawakami, K., Vaccarino, E., Williams, A., Phills, C., & Friesen, J. P. (2019). I don’t see race (or conflict): Strategic descriptions of ambiguous negative intergroup contexts. Journal of Social Issues, 75, 1002-1034.
Friesen, J. P., Kawakami, K., Vingilis-Jaremko, L., Caprara, R., Sidhu D. M. et al. (2019). Perceiving happiness in an intergroup context: The role of race and attention to the eyes in differentiating between true and false smiles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116, 375-395.
Friesen, J. P., Laurin, K., Shepherd, S., Gaucher, D., & Kay, A. C. (2018). System justification: Experimental evidence, its contextual nature, and implications for social change. British Journal of Social Psychology, 58, 315-339.
Kawakami, K., Friesen, J. P., & Vingilis-Jaremko, L. (2018). Visual attention to members of own and other groups: preferences, determinants, and consequences. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(3), e12380.
Gaucher, D., Friesen, J. P., Neufeld, K. H. S., & Esses, V. M. (2018). Changes in the positivity of migrant stereotype content: How system-sanctioned pro-migrant ideology can affect public opinions of migrants. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 223-233.
Friesen, J. P., Campbell, T. H., & Kay, A. C. (2015). The psychological advantage of unfalsifiability: The appeal of untestable political and religious ideologies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, 515-529.
Friesen, J. P., Kay, A. C., Eibach, R. P., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). Seeking structure in social organization: Compensatory control and the psychological advantages of hierarchy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 590-609.
Kay, A.C., & Friesen, J. (2011). On social change and social stability: Understanding when system justification does and does not occur. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 360-364.
Gaucher, D., Friesen, J., & Kay, A. C. (2011). Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 109-128.
Friesen, J., & Sinclair, L. (2011). Distrust and simultaneous activation of multiple categories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 112-119.
Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Peach, J. M., Laurin, K., Friesen, J., Zanna, M. P., & Spencer, S. J. (2009). The power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 421-434.
Student Research
Recent honours theses from the lab include:
We’re all in this together… right? A study on system justification (Sachini Mapa, 2023)
Capturing everyday sadism through a visual distractor task (Adam Swanson, 2023)
Assessing the role of reminder likelihood on audience preference for neutral and insecurity disclosures (Katrina Alder, 2022)
The Jezebel stereotype: The hyper-sexualiation of Black women on dating profiles (Harshna Sethi, 2021)
Unquantifiable attributions to athletic performance (Thomas O’Rourke, 2020)
Genetic ancestry tests and stereotyping (Mackenzie Walpole, 2020).
Polished incivility: A blindspot on the delivering end (Kyla Smorang, 2020).
More than meets the eye: How target race alters visual attention during the first-person shooter task (Inga Christianson, 2019).
Essentialism and genetic ancestry testing: How we judge others (Emma Leppky, 2019).
Why sweat may equal threat: Women’s perceptions of threat and belonging in gym environments (Alesha Frederickson, 2018)
Queue jumper or refugee? The effects of system justification and stereotypes (Jenessa Suszynski, 2018)
Too long didn’t read: The effect of information complexity on unfalsifiable beliefs (Jamie-Lee Vallotton, 2018)
Emotion processing and racial attitudes within interracial contexts (Taylor Jonasson, 2017)
Effects of mindfulness on emotion recognition in intergroup contexts (Premika Perera, 2017)