The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Asia Eaton
Background
Asia Eaton is a graduate student in the Social Psychology Program at the University of Chicago. She is currently the 2008-2009 Social Sciences Visiting Committee Fellow. This dissertation-year fellowship is awarded to only one student in the Social Sciences every year and constitutes one of the highest honors given to graduate students at the University of Chicago.
Asia graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002, with a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Philosophy. As an undergraduate she worked with Dr. Margaret Clark, doing research in the area of interpersonal relationships.
Research Interests
In my first line of research, Dr. Visser and I are examining the relationship between the possession of social power and resistance to attitude change. Specifically, we are accruing experimental and correlational evidence that occupying low-power social roles encourages attitude flexibility and a willingness to yield to the views of others, while occupying high-power social roles encourages more rigid, unyielding attitudes. Recent research using a nationally-representative sample found that the social norm for powerholders to resist persuasion can cause resistance to attitude change by biasing thoughtful information processing.
In my second line of research, I explore the possibility that an increase in the occupation of high-power social roles during the middle adult years may contribute to the reduced persuadability observed during this period of the life span (Visser & Krosnick, 1998). Using nationally-representative data sets, I have empirically demonstrated that midlife adults in the U.S. hold more high-power social roles in a variety of domains than younger and older adults. I also find that those in midlife are the most likely to value the possession of strong attitudes, in line with the norms for those in positions of power. Last, I have found that the possession of power through high-power work roles partly mediates the quadratic effect of age on openness to persuasion. This research adds to our field's growing appreciation of the social and contextual nature of attitude strength as well as to the literature on midlife development.
My third line of research, upon which my dissertation is based, examines the relationship between sex role norms related to persuadability and actual sex differences in attitude strength and persuadability. Given that there are persistent sex differences in prescriptive and descriptive norms for openness to attitude change and attitude strength-related behaviors in the U.S. (e.g. Bem, 1974; Prentice & Carranza, 2002; Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974), I propose that we should be able to detect gender differences in actual persuadability and self-reports of attitude strength in representative sampled of American men and women, and in American male and female participants for whom sex role norms have been made salient.
