Prof. Wetzel′s Biography >>

Research Interests

My research interests fall within the general area of social psychology. A central interest is in prejudice and stereotyping where I have 3 inter-related projects going:

• Causes and consequences of becoming aware of white privilege. Given that our culture subtly provides advantages to White people that are not available to non-Whites, how can awareness be increased and what are the consequences of doing so for people’s racial attitudes? To study these issues, I have developed a Monopoly-style board game to illustrate white privilege. I am currently folding into the game gender privilege, and hope to add sexual orientation, social class, and beauty privilege in the near future. My student collaborators on this project have been: Emily Clark, Jessica Copeland, Michael Campbell, Melanie Mathews, and Brian Baker.
• Implicit prejudice: developing  memory and perceptually-based measures of implicit prejudice beyond those tapped by the IAT (Implicit Association Test) and evaluative priming. My student collaborators in this have been: Whitney Cade, Laura Arnold, and Liv Brown.
• Campus Climate: I am interested in assessing and improving Rhodes’ campus climate regarding diversity issues. Through an internet survey, I have been collecting for the past three years campus wide assessments of  student perceptions of the climate. My collaborators in this endeavor are Drs. Anita Davis and Carla Shirley plus a host of students.

Another interest area is in "illusion and bias," people’s tendency to be deceived and to make suboptimal judgments. These interests have been shuffled to the back burner:

• Detecting incompetence. The roles of the illusion of learning, one′s willingness to admit ignorance, and social/conversational norms in making it so difficult for people to recognize imposters and con-artists.
• Paranormal Beliefs. The social psychological factors which lead many people to interpret their unusual experiences as evidence for paranormal entities or forces. I am developing a scale to measure people’s belief in and experiences with a host of paranormal phenomena.

Dr. Wetzel Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Web Materials

• Student exercise: Can you act randomly?
• Description for Instructors
• My program to generate interactive quizzes on the Web
• One of my current interests involves assessing beliefs about and experiences with the paranormal. You can take my surveys if your browser has the Authorware plug-in. Go to the test page to see if you have it or to download it for free. Then go here to take the surveys.