BIO
Dolores Albarracín (La Plata, Argentina) is the Alexandra Heyman Nash University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Psychology from the Catholic University of La Plata (Argentina) and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Belgrano (Argentina) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (United States). From 1997 to 2007 she was a professor at the University of Florida, before taking up a faculty appointment at the University of Illinois. In 2012, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania where she currently heads the Social Action Lab and the Health and Social Media Group at the Annenberg School for Communication.
Author of over 170 articles and book chapters in the field of psychology and health, her two latest books are Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped and Action and Inaction in a Social World: Predicting and Changing Attitudes and Behavior. Albarracín has served as editor of Psychological Bulletin and numbers among her various distinctions the 2020 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the 2019 Avant Garde Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
CONTRIBUTION
Dolores Albarracín has focused her research on understanding how attitudes can be changed, especially with regard to persuasive messages. In her book Action and Inaction in a Social World: Prediction and Change of Attitudes and Behaviors, she shows that appeals to action are more effective than those encouraging inaction when the goal is to achieve a given behavior, and that when a recipient lacks time to analyze a persuasive message, their attitude and behavior will be determined by the emotional factor.
She has also explored ways to discredit disinformation and conspiracy theories, which are now understood as a problem of social influence rather than a function of individual personality. She reasons that a society facing more uncertainty is more susceptible to conspiratorial messages, which spread through both interpersonal relationships and other media.
For Albarracín, attitude theory is also useful to prioritise which kind of disinformation to deal with, intervening first where it has a direct negative effect. her experimental work has been a key input to public health strategies to prevent risk behaviors that bear in mind environmental influence. She has also shown that although fear-based messaging is more effective, a better course is to try to dissuade people from risk behaviors while promoting healthier options.
