Assistant Professor of Management and Operations Jennifer Whitson joined the faculty of UCLA Anderson last summer from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her B.A. from UC Irvine. Whitson was recently interviewed for a forthcoming documentary that explores the psychology of belief.
Whitson’s research delves into what persuades people to imagine patterns where there aren’t any, such as stock market predictions. She focuses on illusory and accurate pattern perception as well as how the experience of power changes the way we come to understand the world around us. By demonstrating a link between emotional experiences and the desire for structure, her studies have both psychological and management implications.
Whitson co-athored an article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology titled “The Emotional Roots of Conspiratorial Perceptions, System Justification, and Belief in the Paranormal.” It reports the results of experiments the authors conducted after predicting that experiencing emotions reflective of uncertainty about the world (e.g., worry, surprise, fear, hope), compared to “certain” emotions like anger, happiness and disgust, would activate the need to imbue the world with order and structure across a wide range of compensatory measures. They found that self-affirmation eliminated the effects of uncertain emotions on compensatory control.
The film being produced by Fama Media Productions asks, why do we believe the things that we do, whether religious leanings or even conspiracy theories? The filmmakers interview leading psychologists and philosophers to investigate why we continue to believe in things even when there is clear evidence that contradicts that belief. “We chose Jennifer Whitson as our last interviewee because of her research into how uncertainty and control or lack thereof can lead us to see patterns where there are none,” said general manager Mesa Fama. “She is an integral part of our film, as what she brings to it really rounds out and ties together everything we’ve explored.”
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