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Michael R. Baumann received his PhD from
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His graduate education included a
mixture of Social and I/O psychology with a heavy dose of statistics and
research methods. Dr. Baumann’s initial interest in psychology was performance
under stress. However, during his time at Illinois Dr. Baumann also developed an
interest in group processes and group decision making. In the fall of 2000, Dr. Baumann
accepted a visiting position at Washington State University. While there he
completed his dissertation and initiated several collaborative research
projects. After receiving his PhD in 2001, Dr. Baumann joined the faculty at The
University of Texas at San Antonio.
Over the years, Dr. Baumann's research
interests have continued to evolve. Although Dr. Baumann’s work on performance under
stress resulted in several publications and he still pursues such projects on
occasion, his interest in this area has developed into an interest in affect and
decision making in general rather than stress and performance per se. Much of
this change was due to his becoming aware of existing research on the effects of
mood and emotion that went beyond the resource-depletion sorts of models common
in the stress literature of the time. For example, the literature on affect and
decision has shown that people use different decision making strategies when in
different affective states. One such differences is that people who are angry
and people who are happy are much more likely to rely on heuristics,
stereotypes, and other "cognitive shortcuts" than people who are sad. This and
other processing differences have potentially wide ranging implications in a
number of different areas of both social and organizational psychology. Dr.
Baumann is currently pursuing research on how affect influences decision making
in group settings as well as how affect influences the decision to engage in
negative work-related behaviors such as sabotage and theft, positive
work-related behaviors such as helping other employees, and people's decisions
regarding whether to keep their current jobs or quit and find other jobs.
Dr. Baumann’s work on information
processing by groups has also evolved. He is still particularly interested in
the processes by which groups recognize and make use of the
knowledge, skills, or abilities of their members ("expertise") and how this in
turn influences group performance. Although it stands to reason that
groups that make more efficient use of member expertise should perform better
than those that make less efficient use of member expertise, research
shows that groups are often unable to recognize differences in member
expertise. To make matters worse, even when groups do recognize differences in member expertise,
the group does not necessarily listen to and take advantage of that expertise. Examining factors that affect the recognition and
utilization of expertise in groups has resulted in several publication in
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes for Dr. Baumann and his
collaborators. Yet, Dr. Baumann has also become more interested in the
heuristics that group members may use during group discussion, which in turn led
him to start exploring more general issues in person perception such as
physical cues (e.g., facial structure) that people use as heuristics when
forming impressions of others. Will people recognize the expert who doesn't
"look the part?" What does looking the part mean? Although Dr. Baumann has only
recently become interested in such issues, he intends to conduct several
research projects in this vein in the near future.
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