Kimberly Quinn, President Nominee

Institutional affiliation: DePaul University            

Area of specialization: Social Psychology

Summary of professional interests:

“Everything is interesting” read the thank-you card given to me by a graduating doctoral student. To her, this embodied my love of science, and it could not be more true: Over the course of my career, my interests and approaches have varied widely. My dissertation and postdoctoral work (including at Northwestern University) examined the impact of stereotypes on information processing and memory. My first tenure-line job was at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the change in culture upended my thinking and shifted my interests toward self-representation and social and physical connection, particularly in the context of behavioral synchrony. I moved back to Chicago to take a position at DePaul University, once again allowing my local experiences to shift my interests, and my current work focuses on belonging and environmental justice in the context of urban spaces. I have embraced mixed-methods approaches increasingly over time, using methods ranging from EEG and fMRI to eye-tracking and motion-tracking to surveys and interviews. I am learning to leave the lab behind and venture out to engage with community members and non-psychology experts. I am passionate about research methods, teaching courses at both the senior undergraduate and graduate levels; I am also passionate about teaching how to teach. I have been Associate Editor for both Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and Collabra: Psychology, and chair of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science diversity committee. I am currently on the steering committee for the Framework on Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) and Chair of the Department of Psychology at DePaul. My mission is to promote both inclusiveness and rigor across psychological science. I would love to do the same for MPA.

Representative publications:

Chen, J. M., Quinn, K. A., & Maddox, K. B. (2022). Bridging the gap between spontaneous behavior- and stereotype-based impressions. In E. Balcetis & G. Moskowitz (Eds.), The handbook of impression formation (pp. 93–115). Routledge. Preprint available at https://psyarxiv.com/2nbde/

Price, C. A., Greenslit, J., Segovia, G., Harris, N., Quinn, K. A., & Krogh-Jespersen, S. (2021). Awe and memories of learning in science and art museums. Visitor Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/10645578.2021.1907152 

Krogh-Jespersen, S., Quinn, K. A., Krenzer, W. L. D., Nguyen, C., Greenslit, J., & Price, C. A. (2020). Exploring the awe-some: Mobile eye-tracking insights into awe in a science museum. PLoS ONE, 15(9), e0239204. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239204

Quinn, K. A., Bellovary, A. K., & Cole, C. E. (2020). The tribe has spoken: Evidence for the impact of tribal differences in social science is equivocal. Psychological Inquiry, 31(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1722579

Lakens, D., et al. (2018). Justify your alpha. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 168–171. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0311-x

Representative honors or awards:

  • 2022: Chandler Screven Memorial Award, Visitor Studies Association (for Price et al., 2021)
  • 2018: Fellow of the Midwestern Psychological Association
  • 2016: Fellow of the Psychonomic Society
  • 2015: University Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision, University of Birmingham
  • 2014: Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology

Involvement in MPA:

I joined MPA in 1999 as a graduate student, a year before moving to Chicago for a postdoc at Northwestern. I was the only social psychologist from my department to attend the 1999 meeting (to give my very first conference talk—ask me how that went sometime…), and I loved the atmosphere and continued to attend across my postdoc years. I let my membership lapse during the eight years that I lived in the UK, but I renewed my membership as soon as I moved back to Chicago in 2012. Over the years, I’ve chaired symposia, acted as moderator on papers sessions multiple times, and mentored graduate student talks and posters and undergraduate student posters. I was elected as a Fellow of MPA in 2018.