Jason Strickhouser, a graduate student in the social psychology program (Advisor: Dr. Ethan Zell) has been selected to attend the 2015 Summer Institute in Social and Personality Psychology, which is a two-week intensive experience for pre-doctoral students in the discipline. The workshop is taught by key figures in the field and this year’s program will be hosted by Northeastern University.

Jason’s research program focuses on the investigation of how comparisons of performance and ability influence self-evaluations and affective reactions. He is particularly interested in how people deal with the impact of being presented with multiple comparisons simultaneously, given that these may provide contradictory information.

Jason has enjoyed strong success in our program, with a recent publication acceptance, “Self-evaluative effects of dimensional and social comparison”, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The paper reports the results of two studies that revealed that social comparisons have a stronger influence than dimensional comparisons on self-evaluation. The paper can be accessed here.