I'm currently working on several projects that explore people's desire and need for verification and validation as an extension of my social verification theory. For an overview of social verification see: (Hillman, Fowlie, & MacDonald, 2023).
An important consideration for understanding validation as an aspect of social influence is how it balances with other behaviours, like conformity. To better understand this, I have conducted cross-cultural research which is exploring potential differences in preferences for validation and conformity as a function of relational mobility and self-concept clarity across different cultures (Hillman, et al., 2024). I am also currently exploring how extremity and certainty may affect people's decision to confront or seek validation from a third party.
There are several establish processes in which validation is show to operate, but the how or why is not deeply explored. In a few different ongoing programmes of research I have been working on exploring how validation (and belongingness) relates to other established processes, such as attitude congeniality/selective exposure and dissonance (Hillman, Fowlie, & MacDonald, under review). I have also extended this work to explore how the desire for shared reality may enhance preferences for media authored by similar others (Hillman, Williams, & MacDonald, in preparation).
Because validation is such an important behaviour in cases when other options (e.g., conformity) are limited, I am quite interested in exploring the importance of validation for individuals with minoritized identities. I am currently exploring the role of validation in relationships for racial and sexual minority individuals in a qualitative study, as the first step to building this programme of research.
My work on change started with exploring the effects of normative information on temporal self appraisals. We found that traits generally believed to improve were assessed differently than those generally believed to stay the same (Hillman & Hauser, 2021). This work also demonstrated that across several populations, improvement was endorsed far more commonly than stability or decline.
This implied, to us, that perhaps people expected improvement automatically, above and beyond other kinds of change. We found evidence in line with this, suggesting that when lacking information people do indeed assume improvement (Hillman & Hauser, 2023). This research was awarded the SPSP student publication award. I've more recently applied this work directly, assessing how knowledge and ideals differently predict people's perceptions of past and future change in racial inequality (Hillman, Antoun, & MacDonald, In Prep)
My current research in this area seeks to assess how narrative beliefs affect other behaviours and intentions, such as those pertaining to stigma (Woolridge, Hillman, Palmer, & Bowie, Revisions), as well has how narratives different in cultural contexts (Son, Hillman, & Hauser, Under Review). I aim to continue exploring how narratives relate to and one's social reality, and how they interweave with people's desires for verification.
While my work on validation and selective exposure explores deficits of information searches, I have also explored individual differences which may impact information searches. I have assessed people's tendency to jump to conclusions against against implicit motivations to search longer (congeniality bias), and found that jumping to conclusions and implicit motivations seem to be orthogonal influences on search duration (Hillman, Burrows, & Hauser, Under Review). Expanding on this work I've explored how jumping to conclusions may bias searches from the onset, impacting search behaviour far sooner than previously understood, and shaping people's subsquent searches (Hillman et al., 2024).