Javier Granados Samayoa, Ph.D.

Javier Granados Samayoa studies attitudes and social cognition. Specifically, his work focuses on how people’s attitudes and beliefs form, how they generalize, and how they ultimately influence behavior.

Javier Granados Samayoa earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from The Ohio State University. His interest in attitudes and social cognition has been applied to the development of three lines of work. First, he has examined the role of individual differences in attitude generalization tendencies—whether people’s positive or negative attitudes generalize more strongly—in shaping behavior as people pursue their goals. This research has led to the development of a theoretical model of self-regulation in which behavior is viewed as a function of goal-relevant assessments afforded by the situation (e.g., “am I prepared for the test?”) interacting with people’s attitude generalization tendencies. 

In other work, Javier has explored the short- and long-term consequences of believing specific conspiracy theories (e.g., conspiracy theories about COVID-19). For instance, his research documents that believing COVID-19 conspiracy theories at an initial timepoint predicts increases in conspiracist ideation--the general tendency to believe conspiracy theories--six months later. Thus, it appears that endorsing specific conspiracy theories can pave the way for greater receptiveness to a variety of different conspiracy theory beliefs down the road.

Lastly, Javier has written critiques of dominant conceptualizations of implicit bias, and has advocated for a novel conceptualization based on well-supported attitude-to-behavior process models.