Erin focuses on cognitive and motivational biases in information processing, particularly in the context of contemporary social issues such as environmental sustainability and racial and gender inequality. Specifically, she examines the consequences of the motivation to resist changes to existing sociostructural arrangements on basic psychological processes such as perceptual judgment, recall, and evaluation of scientific and media information. She takes a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach that integrates data from laboratory experiments, public opinion surveys, focus group interviews, and longitudinal field research to investigate how information and misinformation is encoded, elaborated, and disseminated. Her work with Margo Monteith and Evelyn Carter has recently been funded by a Diversity Transformation Award at Purdue University. Erin is also actively involved in developing and training advanced quantitative methods.
