Hello! My name is Will and I’m a PhD student in social & personality psychology. I study motivated cognition, and interactions between our emotions, social identities, and belief systems. I am interested in how motivated cognition unfolds within and between people in online discourse, and analyzing digital traces of this behavior. I am co-advised by Drs. Kristin Laurin and Azim Shariff.

Why do people choose their beliefs?

Surprisingly, people do not hold completely accurate beliefs about the world: People often adopt beliefs that benefit their emotional, moral, and social agendas, even at the cost of being factually incorrect. People use narratives, explanations, and belief systems to accomplish their many goals, like being happy, a good person, or a loyal friend, and not just to form accurate representations of reality. I am interested in how people use values to guide beliefs, how much people are aware of this, and the degree to which different people actually endorse this pragmatic approach to belief.

How do people communicate their beliefs?

Beliefs are socially influenced and also travel across people and throughout social networks. I am interested in the interpersonal processes that run this system, how and why beliefs travel through different social networks, and generally in how social media and online discourse influences public opinion.

Shariff, A., Green, J., & Jettinghoff, W. (2021). The Privacy Mismatch: Evolved Intuitions in a Digital World. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(2), 159-166.

Jettinghoff, W. M. (2020). Why do people choose their beliefs?: a new pluralist perspective on belief regulation (Masters thesis, University of British Columbia).

Laurin, K., & Jettinghoff, W. M. (2020). What Kind of Rationalization Is System Justification?. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 43, e39.