Norbert L. Kerr

• Ph. D. 1974 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Affiliations:
  • Social-Personality Interest Group
• Research Interests:
  • Cooperative behavior in social dilemmas (current emphasis on the impact of the threat of social exclusion for encouraging cooperative behavior)
  • Decision making processes in small groups
  • Small group task performance (current emphasis on enhancing group members' task-motivation)
  • Psychology and the law (emphasis on juror/jury decision making)
  • Hypothesis testing strategies in scientific research
• Phone: (517) 355-6645
• Office: 433 Baker
• e-mail: kerr@msu.edu

My current work focuses on six topics--group motivation gains, social dilemmas, group decision making, juror/jury behavior, a vaguely defined topic which we might call "how social psychologists (among others) write up their work", and in-group bias.

1. Over 70 years ago, Otto Kohler provided evidence for intriguing group motivation gains. Guido Hertel, Larry Messe, and I have developed a paradigm within which to study this effect, have been exploring the likely psychological mechanisms underlying it, and have begun to map out its boundary conditions.
2. Our current social dilemma work has been focusing on the effectiveness of social exclusion as a mechanism for social control in social dilemmas.
3. The group decision making work is addressing a couple of questions. First, when are judgmental biases stronger among individuals, and when are they stronger among groups? Second, Ernest Park, Amani El-Alayli, Larry Mess‚ and I have also been doing some research on minority influence, focusing on whether and how the arguments coming from minority factions are processed similarly or differently than comparable messages coming from majority factions.
4. Gary Wells published some intriguing findings in 1992 in JPSP that suggested that jurors can or will only use certain kinds of statistical, base-rate information in certain situations. We (Larry Messe, Keith Niedermeier, and I) have been trying to figure out just what those situations are. Currently we're trying to link our preliminary results on this problem with Wells' arguments about so-called "threshold" models of juror decision making.
5. Some students and I have been exploring how the original conception of a research project gets translated into a finished manuscript. We've done some surveys to get a better idea of what we social scientists do and think we should do, and some experiments exploring the consequences of what we do for the generation and evaluation of alternative hypotheses. A conceptual paper analyzing the pros and cons of various approaches to this problem (Kerr, 1998) appeared recently.
6. At present, I'm trying to get a number of studies on this topic written up and submitted, including (a) failures to replicate the usual in-group favoritism finding, (b) some work with Mike Hogg showing both cultural differences and implicating the presence of other group members as a moderating factor, (c) some work with both Mike and Guido showing the strong links between normative expectations and intergroup discrimination, and (d) some work with Guido demonstrating that one can use primes to accentuate vs. attenuate in-group favortism, much as Wilder's (1986) social script model would suggest.

Selected Recent Publications: A complete Vita is also available.

• Hertel, G., Kerr, N. L., Messe, L. A. (in press). Motivation gains in groups: Paradigmatic and theoretical advances on the Koehler effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Hertel, G., & Kerr, N. L. (in press). Priming and in-group bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
• Kerr, N. L. & Park, E. (in press). Group performance in collaborative and social dilemma tasks: Progress and prospects. To appear in M. Hogg & S. Tindale (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology (Vol. 4, Groups).
• Kerr, N. L. (in press). Social loafing and social striving: Motivational pocesses in task performing groups. To appear in J. Forgas, K. Williams, & L. Wheeler (Eds.), The social mind: Cognitive and motivational aspects of interpersonal behavior. Cambridge University Press.
• Kerr, N. L., Aronoff, J., Messe, L. A. (2000). Methods of small group research. In H. Reis & C. Judd, Research methods in social psychology: A handbook. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kerr, N. L., Niedermeier, K., & Kaplan, M. (1999). Bias in jurors vs. juries: New evidence from the SDS perspective. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 80, 70-86.
• Niedermeier, K., Kerr, N. L., & Messe, L. A. (1999). Jurors' use of naked statistical evidence: Exploring bases and implications of the Wells Effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 533-542.
• Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 196-217.
• Kerr, N. L., Garst, J., Kiehle, D., & Harris, S. (1997). That still, small voice: Commitment to cooperateas an internalized vs. a social norm. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23,1300-1311.
• Kerr, N. L. & Kaufman-Gilliland, C. (1997). "...and besides, I probably couldn't have made a difference anyway.": Rationalizing defection in social dilemmas. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 211-230.
• Kerr, N. L., & Kaufman-Gilliland, C. M. (1994). Communication, commitment, and cooperation in social dilemmas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 513-529.
• Kerr, N. L. (1996). "Does My Contribution Really Matter?": Efficacy in Social Dilemmas. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European Review of Social Psychology (Vol. 7). Chichester: J. Wiley.
• Allison, S. & Kerr, N. L. (1994). Group correspondence biases and the provision of public goods. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 688-698.
• Kerr, N. L., MacCoun, R., & Kramer, G. P. (1996). Bias in judgment: Comparing individuals and groups. Psychological Review, 103, 687-719.
• Kerr, N. L., MacCoun, R. J., Kramer, G. P. (1996). "When are N heads better (or worse) than one?": Biased judgment in individuals vs. groups. In J. H. Davis & E. Witte (Eds.), Understanding group behavior: Consensual action by small groups (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum.
• Kerr, N. L. (1994). Social psychology in court: The case of the prejudicial pretrial publicity. In G. G. Brannigan & M. R. Merrens (Eds.), The social psychologists. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Kerr, N. L., Hymes, R. W., Anderson, A. B., & Weathers, J. E. (1995). Defendant-juror similarity and mock juror judgments. Law and Human Behavior, 19, 545-567.
• Kerr, N. L., (1994). The effects of pretrial publicity on jurors. Judicature, 78, 120-127. (Reprinted in Eskridge, C. (Ed.) (1996). Concepts and issues in criminal justice. Los Angeles: Roxbury Press.)
• Baron, R. S., Kerr, N. L., & Miller, N. (1992). Group process, group decision, group action. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Some Favorite Links

Midwestern Psychological Association
Social Psychology Network
American Psychological Society
Psychology@Yahoo