Kipling Williams
Kipling D. Williams is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychological Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.[1] He graduated from Ohio State University in 1981 with his Ph.D in Social Psychology. Currently, he is a professor of psychological sciences and is the associate editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He is most notable for his research on ostracism, developing unique methods to study the processes and consequences.
Dr. Williams has conducted research in several areas, including aggression, group processes and close relationships. However, he has specific research topics that include ostracism, social loafing and social compensation, internet research, stealing thunder, which is a specific tactic used to deflate any negative impact of changing a person’s testimony, law and psychology.
Dr. Williams has a primary interest in social influence. In addition, he has contributed to publications in both the field of psychology and in the field of law, which deal with issues of different realms of social influence. Some of these realms of social influence concern eyewitness memory and testimony, biasing judges’ instructions, and most recently, on influencing jurors to scrutinize confidence inflation in court cases. However, Dr. Williams’ interests mostly include group processes and social influence. His main research interest is on ostracism, which includes the effects of one being excluded and ignored in society. While some people regard this as simple group research, he regards it as a phenomenon of very basic social influence. He believes that an individual’s emotions, subsequent social susceptibility, and motivations are all impacted when that person is ostracized.
Dr. Williams believes that “social influence is of great importance to his self-definition and to his interest in social psychology.”[2] Simply put, he believes that “the heart of social psychology is social influence.”[3] He has a free downloadable program called “Cyberball,” which can be used in research to study issues that surround social exclusion. Dr. Williams has contributed to different psychological articles and he has also written several different books related to his psychological interests.