Article: Introduction
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Whenever Elizabeth W. Dunn’s boyfriend was cranky, he would come to her and pout. He’d flop on the couch and whine, acting like a grump. Then when they went out and ran into acquaintances, he would perk right up and be in a good mood.
It got her thinking: Is this normal?
“So, being a social psychologist, I brought in 100 undergraduate couples and ran an experiment,” she says.
Ms. Dunn, 26, asked the couples how they expected to feel, and then gauged how they actually felt after spending time with a stranger and with a romantic partner. The experiment, which she conducted as a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Virginia, became the basis for an award-winning dissertation.
She found that most people in her experiment assumed they would be happier after interacting with their romantic partner rather than with someone they had just met. But the opposite effect occurred, because the subjects tried harder to make a good impression on the stranger.
“When we act really charming and pleasant is when we feel our best,” says Ms. Dunn, who herself is ebullient on the telephone.
“She’s just a master at staging those experiments,” says her adviser, Timothy D. Wilson, chairman of the psychology department at Virginia, where Ms. Dunn received her Ph.D. in May.
“She really knows how to look at a set of data and figure out what it’s telling us,” adds Mr. Wilson, who says she is the best student he has had in 20 years.
When she went on the job market last year, Ms. Dunn’s skills, along with glowing recommendations from her professors, got her noticed. Ms. Dunn had already had four articles published -- for two, she was the lead author -- and she was invited to contribute to last February’s issue of the prestigious Annual Review of Psychology. She interviewed for faculty jobs at Ohio State University, the University of Arizona at Tucson, the University of California at Davis, and the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.
She has continued to be very productive since then, having had an article accepted this summer by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“She’s really fast and sharp and ambitious, in all the good senses of that word,” says Darrin R. Lehman, chair of the social-personality program at British Columbia, where Ms. Dunn accepted a tenure-track offer to be an assistant professor.
Although she was recruited to start there in the fall, the university let her defer until April so she could work as a postdoc with Joseph Forgas, a prominent social psychologist at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. She also received $38,000 from British Columbia as start-up money for her research, which she plans to use for lab supplies, for travel money, and perhaps to hire an undergraduate assistant.
‘Everyday Experiences’
“To me, social psychology looks at the questions that really interest people, such as why people are attracted to other people,” says Ms. Dunn. “Why do we have biases we feel we can’t control? What makes us happy?”
More specifically, her work focuses on mood influences and thought, including issues related to self-knowledge and happiness, implicit stereotyping, and subtle forms of prejudice and bias.
Those who know Ms. Dunn say that focus is a perfect fit. Her current boyfriend, Christopher R. Smith, says he has never met anyone as socially adept as she is. “She picks up on what other people are thinking and feeling just by their body language,” says Mr. Smith, a writer, who will join her in Canada next year.
Crystal Gromer, an aunt who helped raise her, says Ms. Dunn displayed social confidence and a strong sense of purpose starting at an early age. At 4, by herself, she flew to Paris to visit her father without a fuss. At 6, she happily went off to camp for a month. And at 8, she and a friend wanted so badly to get on television that they came up with an idea for their own cooking show. They kept pitching the show until they persuaded the local TV station to produce it.
Ms. Dunn now uses her social skills to find fodder for her research. “The everyday experiences you have often provide better ideas than sitting in a library and reading journals,” she says.
For example, as a freshman adviser in college (she graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1999, with a degree in psychology), she used to hear complaints from people who were placed in a residence hall they didn’t want.
So she ran an experiment that looked at how happy college students expected to be -- and how happy they actually were the following year -- about being randomly assigned to different dormitories.
She found that people predicted their happiness based mostly on the location and physical attractiveness of various dorms. But it turned out that most people ended up being pretty happy no matter where they were living. The students reported that what mattered most was the quality of social relationships in the dorm. While that outcome may seem obvious in hindsight, says Ms. Dunn, it is surprising how people overestimate the impact of events on their happiness.
This summer in Sydney, Ms. Dunn has started some new projects. She is looking at the influence of mood on people’s predictions of how they will feel while completing challenging activities. She is also examining the impact of mood on perceptions of terrorism.
But she still finds time to hit the beach to practice surfing, one of her latest passions. She has also been horseback riding, a favorite activity since her summer-camp days.
Ms. Dunn says she looks forward to working with the vibrant, young psychology professors at British Columbia next year. She says her work complements other professors’ work there. For example, Mark Schaller, an associate professor of psychology, has done some innovative work on stereotyping and prejudice, she says. Eric Eich, a professor who works in cognitive psychology, has done research on mood and emotion that is also relevant to her work.
But more than the specific research interests of the faculty, Ms. Dunn says she was attracted by the energy of the department. She says she had always imagined that interviewing for a faculty job would be stressful, but when she had dinner with professors from British Columbia, she actually enjoyed herself.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 51, Issue 2, Page A10