Wendy Wood - US grants

The overall goal of the research in this proposal is to identify the affective and cognitive processes by which minority and majority sources exert influence. The proposed research is designed to provide an integrative and unifying framework for understanding the effects of minority sources as well as to study systematically the impact of minority appeals on the processes known to underlie influence. These goals will be accomplished through meta-analytic testing and integration of existing research findings as well as through experimental investigation. The proposed research will examine the impact of appeals from minority and majority sources on source perceptions, message processing, and affective responses and will assess the role of these factors as mediators of source effects on influence. Because the behavioral style accompanying minority appeals is believed intrinsic to the unique effects of these sources, the proposed process framework will be used to explicate the effects of various influence styles.

DESCRIPTION (adapted from the investigator's abstract): "The proposed research program develops and tests an integrative theoretical model of the role of habits in behavior generation and control. Research on habits can yield insight into classic questions in psychology such as the relation between thought and action and the way in which people structure and regulate ongoing behavior in everyday life. Habits also represent a promising area of research investigation for practitioners interested in changing established behavior patterns. The conceptual analysis builds on theories of automaticity to develop a dual-mode model of behavior generation. Habitual responding, which occurs when acts have been performed frequently in stable contexts, is contrasted with conscious processing (either superficial or systematic). The model received initial support in a meta-analytic synthesis of the behavior prediction literature by Ouellette and Wood (1998), and the proposed research extends this analysis in important new directions. The first thrust of the proposed research is to identify the cognitive and affective experiences that accompany the performance of habitual behavior in everyday life. The second focus is to provide evidence that habits contribute to the effective self-regulation of behavior. The final thrust of the research program is to identify effective change strategies that address the unique vulnerability of habits their dependence on the context in which behavior is performed."

The Pratt School of Engineering (Pratt) at Duke University proposes an effective program to increase the diversity, including gender diversity - in the engineering academy. Pratt's success in hiring outstanding women faculty in engineering was accomplished by reserving one to two faculty lines each year at the School level for departments and strategic initiative leaders to compete for by recruiting targets of opportunity. TOPS is more than a recruiting strategy. It is an effective and sustainable methodology for attracting underrepresented faculty to the engineering academy. It consists of developing a longitudinal database of outstanding under-represented students at various stages of their graduate studies (with a focus on minority women), tracking their progress, having consistent interactions with these students over time, encouraging them to pursue an academic career, making home visits to their respective institutions, inviting them to Duke for visits, and ultimately recruiting them into the academy. TOPS aims to overcome a key entry barrier--the inclusion factor.

To help transform the engineering discipline, the TOPS methods and results are disseminated to the engineering and science communities through the TOPS web site, coaching clinics, and research publications. The TOPS program collaborates with complementary programs. Pratt plans to recruit faculty who are applying their talents, in part, to improve the quality of life, life without pain, without fear, and in harmony with the environment.

Intellectual Merits: Through the TOPS program, important social research presents
data regarding critical mass versus tokenism; comparative studies on the experiences of students and faculty within Pratt to a comparison group of equivalents in science departments; and evaluate the perception that engineering is a masculine field and is not a people-oriented discipline. TOPS is committed to a rigorous assessment and study of the proposed methods, techniques, and impacts.

Broader Impacts: Through TOPS, Pratt develops Best Practices for recruiting, retaining, and
advancing under-represented, particularly female, faculty in engineering and science. The dissemination of these Best Practices are expected to positively impact engineering and science disciplines, and the nation by enhancing the country's ability to solve problems and create a better world.

This grant awarded through the National Science Foundations Major Research Instrumentation competition permits the Principal Investigator, Dr. Mark Leary and Duke University to purchase a mobile behavioral research laboratory. This consists of a vehicle, approximately 41 feet in length which includes five soundproofed cubicles, a larger room capable of holding up to five people and a psychophysiological measurement system with integrated computers and audio-visual systems to enable integration of the individual measures (heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response and respiration). University based behavioral research is often conducted on students at the institution because these are the most available individuals who are conveniently located near the necessary laboratory facilities. Such a constraint often severely limits the populations which can be incorporated into research and also restricts the types of questions which can be asked. This mobile laboratory permits researchers to incorporate a much wider range of individuals and topics into their work. It will be possible, for example to access members of minority, underserved and hard-to-reach groups and increase the number and availability of participants. Among the wide range of topics scheduled for inclusion of Duke University studies, examples include studies of: in situ research of public school choice among diverse population groups; field experiments of in situ reactions to local political meetings; decision-making among the elderly (who can be recruited at retirement centers); studies of disadvantaged individuals who lack health care; judgment and decision-making processes among average Americans; effects of after school programs.

It is also hoped that the availability of more diverse samples and an expanded repertoire of research topics will attract greater numbers of undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups to pursue training and careers in social, behavioral and economic sciences, thereby expanding the size, scope and diversity of the scientific work force.

The NSF Sustainable Energy pathways (SEP) Program, under the umbrella of the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative, will support the research program of Profs. Burcin Becerik-Gerber of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Wendy Wood of the Department of Psychology, David Gerber of the Department of Architecture, and Milind Tambe of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). The multi-disciplinary team of investigators will develop an energy-aware, cyber-physical multi agent framework of buildings, humans, and intelligent software agents for sustainable energy management, taking a collective, energy literacy approach to influencing building occupants, operators, designers, and engineers. The investigators will first assess behavior and preferences of building occupants, evaluate building design/system specifications, and identify building operational policies. They will then build a multi-agent model to integrate these different systems. Building on fundamental research in agents' autonomy and teamwork, the multi-agent framework will facilitate negotiations between occupants and building devices. The agents will provide feedback to the occupants and control building devices to conserve energy. Based on this integrated model, feedback about occupant energy use to building designers will be provided to shape early-stage design decisions that have the longest lasting impact on building's lifecycle footprint. The central focus is designing a multi-component model of energy consumption in office buildings in order to identify and test the optimal points of change in energy systems. Specifically, the research predicts that energy use could be optimized and occupant comfort could be maximized in an integrated way by changing occupant behavior, design/system specifications, and building operators' policies via an agent-based system. The research will be validated in an office building, where occupants lack the individual financial incentives for energy consumption. The system will be tested both in professional and student designer studios to validate the impact of the model in energy aware design decisions. The research differentiates itself by treating occupant preferences and behavior not only as input data but also as controllable variables in a broader energy system; it then harnesses a complex multiagent system to control these variables for energy savings. It also extends energy literacy into the arena of design and engineering by providing human behavior input in early design stages, as well as into the arena of building operations by dynamically controlling buildings based on human behavior and preferences.

With respect to the increasing energy needs of our country and world, this research has far-reaching impact on environmental conservation, pollution, and the economy. The primary impact of this research is identifying the key factors that create significant energy savings for buildings, resulting in monetary savings and environmental protection. The results will be disseminated through and contribute to multiple conference talks and publications. A game, in which students will compete to save the most energy, will be developed with the aim of teaching how to conserve energy in daily life. Energy-focused workshop lessons will be developed and delivered to minority-majority K-12 schools in USC's neighborhood and other children and their families. In addition, the research team will partner in research with the computer science department of California State University, Dominguez Hills, a minority majority institution.

The proposed interdisciplinary research challenges the ways that building engineers and designers, computer scientists, and behavioral scientists look at the pressing challenges of energy-efficient buildings. The research will integrate design with outside data sources and bring behavioral science to design, which in turn will trigger a design-method evolution for sustainable buildings. Through dynamic data collection, spatiotemporal information about energy use, and data on human comfort, the research will improve system optimization and adaptation through the use of intelligent software agents. The project will educate building occupants about their energy consumption and the ways that they can make concrete behavioral changes to achieve greater energy efficiency. The research brings to the problem of energy literacy an interdisciplinary approach in which cyber tools are manifested in physical space.