As a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Dr. Andrew Rivers seeks to further develop effective instructional methods that facilitate student learning. His past teaching experiences include working with undergraduates in Montana and California, First Nations peoples in Washington state, and incarcerated adults in the California State prison system.

My research interests focus on the role of executive functioning in the regulation of racial stereotypes. Specifically, I have sought to more completely investigate and challenge traditional dual-process accounts of automatic or implicit stereotyping. Drawing from Moors (2010) and Sherman (2016), I ask whether the influence of racial stereotypes are 1) unconditionally automatic (as generally thought according to traditional models), 2) conditionally automatic (i.e., dependent on the individual’s self-regulatory abilities), 3) situationally automatic (i.e., dependent on operating conditions afforded by the individual’s situation).

I investigate these possibilities using formal mathematical modeling to disentangle component processing mechanisms from resultant behavioral outcomes. These models frequently take the form of Multinomial Processing Trees (MPTs) and/or Drift Diffusion Models (DDMs).

Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2021). There’s nothing social about social priming: Derailing the “train wreck.” Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1-11. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/kp249/

Reichardt, R., Rivers, A. M., Reichardt, J., & Sherman, J. W. (2020). Further validation of measures of target detection and stereotype activation in the Stereotype Misperception Task. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(3047). Freely available at: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573985

Sherman, J. W., & Rivers, A. M. (2020). Social priming: Time to ditch a dubious term? Nature, 579(7797), 29. Freely available at: 10.1038/d41586-020-00616-1

Rivers, A. M., Sherman, J. W., Rees, H. R., Reichardt, R., & Klauer, K. C. (2019) On the roles of stereotype activation and application in diminishing implicit bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/7w8yz

Rivers, A. M., & Hahn, A. (2019). What cognitive mechanisms do people reflect on when they predict IAT scores? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(6), 878-892. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/qhzrb

Hutchings, R. J., Calanchini, J., Huang, L. M., Rees, H. R., Rivers, A. M., Roth, J., & Sherman, J. W. (2019). Retrieval cues fail to influence contextualized evaluations. Cognition and Emotion. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1631757

Shields, G. S., Rivers, A. M., Ramey, M. M., Trainor, B. C., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2019). Mild acute stress improves response speed without impairing accuracy or interference control in two selective attention tasks: Implications for theories of stress and cognition. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 108, 78-86. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.06.001

Rees, H. R., Rivers, A. M., & Sherman, J. W. (2019). Implementation intentions reduce implicit stereotype activation and application. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(1), 37-53. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/zheun

Calanchini, J., Rivers, A. M., Klauer, K. C., & Sherman, J. W. (2018). Multinomial processing trees as theoretical bridges between cognitive and social psychology. Psychology of Learning & Motivation, 69, 39-65. doi: 10.1016/bs.plm.2018.09.002

Rivers, A. M., Rees, H. R., Calanchini, J., & Sherman, J. W. (2017). Implicit bias reflects the personal and the social. Psychological Inquiry, 28(4), 301-305. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/qm592

Rivers, A. M. (2017). The Weapons Identification Task: Recommendations for adequately-powered research. PLoS ONE, 12(6). Freely available at: 10.1371/journal.pone.0177857

Rivers, A. M., Calanchini, J., & Sherman, J. W. (2016). The self-regulation of implicit social cognition. In K. D. Vos & R. F. Baumeister (Eds.), Handbook of Self-regulation. New York: Guilford Press. Freely available postprint at: psyarxiv.com/786sh

Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251). doi: 10.1126/science.aac4716

Dr. Rivers does not mentor graduate students.