Amanda Williams

Amanda joined the GoSE in December, 2015. Before coming to Bristol Amanda held positions as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University (Sheffield, United Kingdom) and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Interpersonal and Social Perception Lab at the University of Hawaii (Honolulu, United States). Amanda received her B.A. (Psychology & Sociology) from the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), Ed.M. (Educational Studies) from the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada), and Ph.D. (Social Psychology) from York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).

As an avid people-watcher, Amanda is fascinated by how individuals from diverse backgrounds interact with each other. Her research interests center on how automatically activated associations (implicit attitudes and stereotypes) influence the perceptions of, and subtle behaviour (e.g., visual attention, nonverbal behaviours) toward, diverse others. To gain a better understanding of how these biases emerge across the lifespan, her research incorporates aspects of both Social and Developmental Psychology.

Amanda takes an experimental and multi-method approach to address her research questions, administering eye-tracking, reaction-time, behavioural, and questionnaire measures to both adult and child participants. By using a multi-discipline and multi-method approach, she hopes to advance our theoretical understanding of the automatic components that underlie social cognition, gaining a richer understanding of when and how prejudicial and stereotypical beliefs develop and how these beliefs influence behaviour toward others. Amanda's goal is to design and evaluate interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations across the lifespan.

Her research interests fall into the following three areas:

Development of (Implicit) Prejudice and Stereotypes in Childhood: When do children begin to use race to guide their beliefs and cognitions about others? Is there a critical point for interventions in childhood?

Visual Attention during Person Perception: How do we process outgroup faces? Does visual attention correspond to behavior? Is visual attention malleable?

Behavior during Interracial Interactions: How do children and adults negotiate intergroup interactions? Can contextual cues impact behavior?