David Lewis Hamilton (born in 1941) is an American social psychologist and researcher currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1]
David received his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and his master's degree from the University of Richmond.[2] He received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Illinois under supervision by Ivan Steiner and then was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University for 8 years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976.[3] His focus shifted from trying to understand personality to trying to understand how people perceive personality.[4]
His research focuses on the perception of people and groups and how processes related to these perceptions affect Stereotype formation and use. He has produced a lot of research that has contributed to our understanding of psychology, with two major ones listed below:
He found that processing biases could produce false judgements of correlations between two things that were not related.[5] He found that illusory correlations form when small groups become associated with infrequent behaviour even when the behaviour frequency did not differ between other groups.[6] This idea was very important in Social cognition.
Perceived Entitativity: His research has shown that perceived coherence in groups or people has important consequences for judgements of those entities.[5]
Articles
Books