I'm currently working on several projects that explore how engage with others, particularly when they disagree.
Social relationships provide not only safety and belonging, but also certainty and understanding of the world. Thus, feelings of social rejection and isolation can exacerbate needs for certainty, and feelings of uncertainty can exacerbate needs for belonging. I developed Social Verification Theory (Hillman, Fowlie, & MacDonald, 2023), which highlights the interconnection of these two needs and discusses the key role of social validation in meeting both. An important aspect of this theory is how people navigate disagreement. Disagreement in an unchangeable domain (e.g., identity) may lead people to opt to seek validation by advocating for themselves or seeking support. Conversely, a disagreement in a less changeable relationship (e.g., a parent) may lead people to conform, attempting to change themselves to reduce disagreement. In empirical work, I tested these moderators and found evidence that both perceived changeability of one’s self and their relationships impacted how people preferred to solve social inconsistency. Further, these effects were consistent across Western (Canada) and Eastern (Korea) cultural contexts (Hillman, Son, Jyung, & MacDonald, 2025). One’s perception of how strong others’ beliefs are can also affect how they aim to resolve disagreement. My work at Ohio State has explored how holding—or perceiving others as holding—extreme attitudes and beliefs affect people’s responses to disagreement and perceptions of political polarization. In the first major part of this work, I have analyzed archival voter data and over one billion words of text from presidential, congressional, and media sources and found that political communications have been growing more extreme over the past 50 years, in line with increased voter polarization. These trends hold controlling for factors such as source, wordcount, and evaluation frequency (Hillman, Mang, Kannath, Koetke, Petty, Under Review). In follow-up work, I am also examining how these changes in the political extremity of discourse can affect people’s approaches to resolving political disagreements. This work shows both independent effects of being more extreme and perceiving others as more extreme as leading to increased desire to change other people’s beliefs and reduced willingness to change one’s own (Hillman, Mang, Kannath, Petty; In Prep). I am also exploring means of addressing this growing communication divide, such as using two-sided communications (those which validate the recipient’s perspective while advocating against it). Preliminary results suggest that two-sided communications may reduce counter-arguing (through increasing felt validation) but may also backfire and, in some contexts, increase counter-arguing (through more perceived openness).
Social factors highlighted in SVT can also guide cognition in seemingly non-social contexts. In my dissertation (Hillman, 2024), I hypothesized that selecting media aligned with one’s beliefs could be a validation-seeking behaviour, as media are presumed to be reflective of another person’s (i.e., the author’s) views. Consistent with this hypothesis, I found both correlational and experimental evidence suggesting that social invalidation (i.e., through perceived and manipulated social consensus) increased bias toward belief-confirming news. This expectation of validation also guided selection preferences to more similar authors when the topic was ambiguous (Hillman, Williams, & MacDonald, Under Review). This finding also reliably emerged even when participants expected that validating information would dampen their mood (e.g., upsetting stories), suggesting a strong hedonic motivation. In line with SVT, I found that social exclusion increased biases to belief-confirming information above and beyond mood or article liking effects (Hillman, Fowlie, & MacDonald, Accepted). This has important implications for those who might be at risk for biased consumption of media (particularly non-mainstream media such as extreme and polarizing media or misinformation). Beyond strictly social concerns, I have also explored more cognitive sources of bias, such as how a person’s tendency to jump to conclusions leads to biasing in both the generation of hypotheses and subsequent information searches (Hillman, Burrows, Jensen, Hauser, 2024). In similar work, I have directly tested how cognitive (jumping to conclusions) and social (in-group) biases interact to determine selective exposure biases in political information searches (Hillman, Burrows, Hauser, 2025). I will continue developing SVT, focusing on basic processes underlying verification, such as epistemic and belongingness needs. This work will examine when one need could take precedence over the other, what outcomes these needs could precipitate, and what moderators might affect these needs and outcomes.
Stories are among the oldest and most ubiquitous form of social information dissemination. Story trajectories that are particularly salient and accessible (e.g., hero’s journey or redemption narratives), in a social context take on normative qualities. Like norms, these narratives can be reflected in people’s expectations for change in themselves and others. Not only are there robust normative expectations for many traits, but people hold strong expectations of change for themselves and others aligned with these narratives (Hillman & Hauser, 2021). People may also lean on erroneous narratives to serve their cognitive needs, such as when making estimations of change with no evidence. Consistent with the prominent and highly salient collective narratives of improvement in North America, I found that people showed a robust tendency to (often erroneously) presume improvement for a wide range of contexts. I found that this inference led people to overestimate racial progress in America. This overestimation (though erroneous) was associated with important outcomes, such as reduced support for policies to rectify inequality (Hillman, Antoun, & Hauser, 2023). Not all narratives are erroneously positive, however. I have also found that overly pessimistic beliefs of improvement were strongly associated with stigmatizing beliefs toward those with severe mental illness (Woolridge, Hillman, Palmer, & Bowie, 2025). To better understand how collective narratives emerge and vary across contexts, I have explored differences in expectations for masculine and feminine traits between Canada and Korea (two cultural traditions with contrasting perceptions of change; see Ji, 2005). We found robust differences in expectations of gender trait change over time, mirroring linear stories in the West and cyclical stories in the East (Son, Hillman, Jyung, Hauser, van Anders, 2025). In ongoing and planned work, I aim to further understand the narratives people hold and how they may help reduce uncertainty and foster belonging in their social groups.