Peter H. Ditto

About

Professor Peter H. Ditto is the Principal Investigator at the UCI Hot Cognition Lab, affiliated with the UCI School of Social Ecology. His research interests encompass Social Psychology, Human Judgment and Decision-making, Political Psychology, and Moral Reasoning. The lab page lists his role and research focus but does not provide further detailed biographical information or descriptions of his background and key contributions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Internet privacy
• Ecology
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• Political sectarianism in America

  Science · 2020 · 875 citations

  A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracy

  DOI

• Influencing climate change attitudes in the United States: A systematic review and meta-analysis

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2021 · 139 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023 · 96 citations

  Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance.…

  PublisherDOI

• Political differences in free will belief are associated with differences in moralization.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2020 · 71 citations

  performed it (Studies 7a-d). These results are consistent with our theory that political differences in free will belief are at least partly explicable by conservatives' tendency to moralize, which strengthens motivation to justify blame with stronger belief in free will and personal accountability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

  DOI

• Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time

  Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · 2021 · 64 citations

  Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three ver…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HS008180

  NIH · $1.6M · 2002

• NIH Grant R03HS007660

  NIH · $69k · 1995

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph H. Danks

  118 shared

• William D. Smucker

  Summa Health System

  117 shared

• Kristen M. Coppola

  Johnson University

  106 shared

• Angela Fagerlin

  96 shared

• Lisa K. Lockhart

  Texas A&M University

  90 shared

• Renate Houts

  Duke University

  88 shared

• R. Mitchell Gready

  Kent State University

  85 shared

• Jamila Bookwala

  Lafayette College

  83 shared

Labs

• UCI Hot Cognition LabPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Princeton University

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Julian F. Thayerh-121
• Candice L. Odgersh-74
• Jutta Heckhausenh-69