Kipling Williams
Encyclopedia
Kipling D. Williams is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychological Science at Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

 in West Lafayette, Indiana
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

. He graduated from Ohio State University
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

 in 1981 with his Ph.D in Social
Psychology
. Currently, he is a professor of psychological sciences and is the associate editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He is most notable for his research on ostracism, developing unique methods to study the processes and consequences.

Dr. Williams has conducted research in several areas, including aggression
Aggression
In psychology, as well as other social and behavioral sciences, aggression refers to behavior between members of the same species that is intended to cause humiliation, pain, or harm. Ferguson and Beaver defined aggressive behavior as "Behavior which is intended to increase the social dominance of...

, group processes and close relationships. However, he has specific research topics that include ostracism, social loafing
Social loafing
In the social psychology of groups, social loafing is the phenomenon of people exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone...

and social compensation, internet research, stealing thunder, which is a specific tactic used to deflate any negative impact of changing a person’s testimony, law and psychology.

Dr. Williams has a primary interest in social influence. In addition, he has contributed to publications in both the field of psychology and in the field of law, which deal with issues of different realms of social influence. Some of these realms of social influence concern eyewitness memory and testimony, biasing judges’ instructions, and most recently, on influencing jurors to scrutinize confidence inflation in court cases. However, Dr. Williams’ interests mostly include group processes and social influence. His main research interest is on ostracism, which includes the effects of one being excluded and ignored in society. While some people regard this as simple group research, he regards it as a phenomenon of very basic social influence. He believes that an individual’s emotions, subsequent social susceptibility, and motivations are all impacted when that person is ostracized.

Dr. Williams believes that “social influence is of great importance to his self-definition and to his interest in social psychology.” Simply put, he believes that “the heart of social psychology is social influence.” He has a free downloadable program called “Cyberball,” which can be used in research to study issues that surround social exclusion. Dr. Williams has contributed to different psychological articles and he has also written several different books related to his psychological interests.
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