Carman W Fowler

Research

Research Interests

NeuroDiversity & The Workplace

What is the specific shape of bias against NeuroDiverse individuals, different from other biases e.g. gender & racial?
How can we improve hiring outcomes for NeuroDiverse individuals?
What are the most effective workplace accomodations and how can they be efficiently implemented?

Uncertainty in Decision Making

How do individuals cope with uncertainty? How does it affect how individuals make decisions, even those they've made before?
Does uncertainty more strongly affect certain individuals? e.g. NeuroDiverse individuals
What is the role of uncertainty on financial decision making for individuals with chronic illnesses?

Stereotypes & Biases

Beyond stereotypes themselves, how do people perceive the magnitude and scope of certain stereotypes?
Are particular group differences exaggerated beyond the actual but not seen as stereotypes? Are true group differences diminished in the aim of stereotype reduction?
How do people regulate their stereotyped thinking?

Publications

Seen and not seen: How people judge ambiguous behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic - Journal of Risk and UncertaintyHow do we judge others’ behavior when they are both seen and not seen—when we observe their behavior but not the underlying traits or history that moderate the perceived riskiness of their behavior? We investigate this question in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: How people make sense of, and judge, vaccination-contingent behaviors—behaviors, such as going to the gym or a bar, which are considered to be more or less risky and appropriate, depending on the target’s vaccination status. While decision theoretic models suggest that these judgments should depend on the probability that the target is vaccinated (e.g., the positivity of judgments should increase linearly with the probability of vaccination), in a large-scale pre-registered experiment (N = 936) we find that both riskiness and appropriateness judgments deviate substantially from such normative benchmarks. Specifically, when participants judge a stranger’s behavior, without being asked to think about the stranger’s vaccination status, they tend to judge these behaviors similarly positively to behaviors of others who are known to be fully vaccinated. By contrast, when participants are explicitly prompted to think about the vaccination status of others, they do so, leading them to view others more disparagingly, at times even more negatively than what a normative benchmark would imply. More broadly, these results suggest new directions for research on how people respond to risk and ambiguity. We demonstrate that even subtle cues can fundamentally alter what information is “top of mind,” that is, what information is included or excluded when making judgments.

Presentations

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