David Hamilton

David Lewis Hamilton (born in 1941) is an American social psychologist and researcher currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Education and academic career David received his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and his master's degree from the University of Richmond. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Illinois under supervision by Ivan Steiner and then was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University for 8 years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976. His focus shifted from trying to understand personality to trying to understand how people perceive personality.

Research His research focuses on the perception of people and groups and how processes related to these perceptions affect Stereotype formation and use. He has produced a lot of research that has contributed to our understanding of psychology, with two major ones listed below:

Illusory correlation: He found that processing biases could produce false judgements of correlations between two things that were not related. He found that illusory correlations form when small groups become associated with infrequent behaviour even when the behaviour frequency did not differ between other groups. This idea was very important in Social cognition.

Perceived Entitativity: His research has shown that perceived coherence in groups or people has important consequences for judgements of those entities.

Selected publications Articles

Books

Hamilton, D. L., Sherman, S. J., Way, N., & Percy, E. J. (2015). Convergence and divergence in perceptions of persons and groups. In American Psychological Association eBooks (pp. 229–261). APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Volume 2: Group processes.