Nick Buttrick

Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Our lab uses a socioecological approach to understand contemporary society, one that examines how structural, demographic, geographic, cultural, and historical factors create individual psychology in real-world contexts. We use a multi-method approach, including laboratory experiments, on-line studies, archival research, and surveys with a stress on promoting open replicable practices. Currently, we are focusing on the psychology of peculiarly American cultural beliefs including the symbolism of gun ownership (such as how people think about guns, what historical and demographic patterns have shaped those thoughts, how they use them to cope with threat in everyday life, how they use them to signal identity, and what happens to communities in the wake of gun violence), the ways in which people think about effort and success (such as how people think about those who succeed, how they think about the failures of themselves and others, how they use a linkage between effort and success to shore up beliefs about hierarchy, meritocracy, and deservingness, how such beliefs are shaped by schemas like the Protestant Work Ethic, how these beliefs differ by sociodemographic positioning such as class, and how these beliefs are similar to and different from non-American cultural traditions surrounding the importance of effort), and the political and motivational consequences of America’s built environments (such as the ways in which walkable neighborhoods or neighborhoods full of parks and recreation allow for different sorts of interpersonal interactions among strangers and how residential mobility and its decline in the United States shapes the ways that people are able to form relationships). As a lab full of pragmatists, we’re ultimately interested in making sure that our research *does* something, using the power of theoretically-driven psychology to develop meaningful interventions into the world.