Psychology

Background

• Dr. Edwards is a social psychologist specializing in social cognition and individual differences. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation, Consulting Psychologists Press, and the Department of Defense.
• His general area of research concerns the motivational and personality factors that influence how people make judgments about other people. His specific areas of research concern:
  • Causal uncertainty, or uncertainty about the causes of events (and related variables such as depression), and how it impacts social information processing.  Recent research extends this work into the health domain.
  • Intersections between Buddhist philosophy and social cognition
  • Attributions about situations, with an emphasis on people’s understanding of the underlying qualities that people attribute to situations

Selected Publications:

Oreg, S., Edwards, J., Rauthmann, J. (2020). The Situation Six: Uncovering Six Basic Dimensions of Psychological Situations from the Hebrew Language.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118: 835-863.

Li, Z., & Edwards, J.A. (2020). The Negative Relation between System Justification and Perspective-Taking and Empathy. In press at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Allen, P.A., Edwards, J.A., & McCullough, W. (2015). Buddhist Theories of Karma and the Effect of Prosocial Behavior on Perceptions of Others. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 25, 1-17.

Allen, P.A., Edward, J.A., Snyder, F., Makinson, K.A., & Hamby, D.M. (2014). The effect of cognitive load on decision-making with graphically displayed uncertainty information. Risk Analysis, 34, 1495-1505.

Edwards, J. A., Snyder, F., Allen, P. A., Makinson, K. A., & Hamby, D. M.  (2012).  Decision making for risk management: A comparison of graphical methods for presenting quantitative uncertainty.  Risk Analysis, 32, 2055-2070.

Helzer, E., & Edwards, J. A.  (2012).  Causal Uncertainty and Global versus Local Thinking. Social Cognition, 30, 519-536.

Edwards, J. A., & Templeton, A.  (2005).  The structure of perceived attributes of situations.  European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 705-723.

Weary, G., & Edwards, J. A. (1994). Individual differences in causal uncertainty.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 308-318.

Edwards, J. A., & Weary, G. (1993).  Depression and the impression formation continuum: Piecemeal processing despite the availability of category information.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 636-645.