The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Ave
Chicago, IL, 60637
Asia Eaton
Background
Asia Eaton is a fifth year graduate student in the Social Psychology Program 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 (now at Yale University), doing research in the area of interpersonal relationships.
Research Interests
My research interests include attitudes and persuasion, social power, gender, and the self. I am pursuing two programmes of research related to these topics.
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 atttitude flexibility and a willingness to yield to the views of others, while occupying high-power social roles encourages more rigid, unyielding attitudes. One of the long-term aims of this line of research is to determine the extent to which age-graded social roles can account for the curvilinear pattern of attitude change over the life course documented in Visser & Krosnick's life stages model (1998). Specifically, I am exploring the possibility that the accumulation of high-power social roles during the middle adult years (relative to young and older adult years) may contribute to reduced vulnerability to persuasion during this period of the life span. By exploring the effects of social power on susceptibility to attitude change I hope to understand more about attitude strength and resistance to persuasion generally.
My second line of research, upon which my dissertation is based, examines the relationship between sex role norms related to the possession and maintanence of strong attitudes 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 os American men and women, and in American male and female participants for whom sex role norms have been made salient.
