David Lewis Hamilton (born in 1941) is an American social psychologist and researcher currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Education and academic career

David received his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and his master's degree from the University of Richmond. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Illinois under supervision by Ivan Steiner and then was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University for 8 years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976. His focus shifted from trying to understand personality to trying to understand how people perceive personality.

Research

His research focuses on the perception of people and groups and how processes related to these perceptions affect

Stereotype In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalization, generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can ...

formation and use. He has produced a lot of research that has contributed to our understanding of psychology, with two major ones listed below:

Illusory correlation In psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such ...

: He found that processing biases could produce false judgements of correlations between two things that were not related. He found that illusory correlations form when small groups become associated with infrequent behaviour even when the behaviour frequency did not differ between other groups. This idea was very important in Social cognition. Perceived

Entitativity In social psychology, entitativity is the degree to which a group is perceived as a cohesive, unified entity. It describes how much a collection of individuals is seen as "group-like" and bonded by common attributes, such as shared goals or traits ...

: His research has shown that perceived coherence in groups or people has important consequences for judgements of those entities.

Awards

* 1987 - MERIT Award from the

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primar ...

* 2000 -

Tom Ostrom Thomas Marshall Ostrom (March 1, 1936 – May 16, 1994) was a psychologist who helped further the study of social psychology. Prior to Ostrom, the field explored and identified the cognitive foundations of social activity. Ostrom pushed the field ...

award from Person Memory Interest Group for ''"outstanding contributions to social cognition"'' * 2008 - Jean-Claude Codol Award from the

European Association of Social Psychology The European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), formerly the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP) is a scientific professional organization of social psychologists. EASP currently has over 1200 members worldwide and ...

for ''"contributions to the advancement of social psychology in Europe"'' * 2014 - Distinguished Alumni Award from

Gettysburg College Gettysburg College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1832, the campus is adjacent to the Gettysburg Battlefield. Gettysburg College has about ...

David Hamilton , Psychological & Brain Sciences , UCS. https://web.archive.org/web/20230127204429/https://psych.ucsb.edu/people/emeriti/david-hamilton

Selected Publications

Articles * * * * * * Books * * Hamilton, D. L., Sherman, S. J., Way, N., & Percy, E. J. (2015). Convergence and divergence in perceptions of persons and groups. In ''American Psychological Association eBooks'' (pp. 229–261)
APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Volume 2: Group processes.
*

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hamilton, David 21st-century American psychologists University of California, Santa Barbara faculty 1941 births Living people American social psychologists