Social Motivation Lab

Thane Pittman

On Sabbatical 2010-11

Check back in Fall 2011

Lab Director
Professor, Department of Psychology

I am a Social Psychologist, newly arrived at Colby in the fall of 2004. Born in San Antonio, Texas, I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. I discovered social psychology in my senior year in college when I read the book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance for a Sociology course in Public Opinion. I asked my Professor (Jerry Lewis) what people who did that kind of work called themselves, and he said "Oh, that's social psychology." I decided I would be a social psychologist, and it's the best decision I have ever made.

I taught at Gettysburg College for many years (let's not count how many), but took the opportunity to work at other institutions (Princeton University, the University of Toronto, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Maryland), and spent the last three years before coming to Colby at Princeton, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Psychology and the course on Negotiation in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. I decided to come to Colby because the opportunity to help to build a new psychology department, and to live in Maine, was too attractive to resist. And as you can see by learning about the rest of my research team, I have the chance to work with some amazing Colby students. The chance to keep my sailboat, Salience, in Belfast Harbor on western Penobscot Bay was kind of nice too.

People are interesting, and although it is fashionable to use computer analogies to understand some aspects of human information processing, people are nothing like computers. Our desires, hopes, fears, and needs have pervasive influences on everything that we think, feel, and do. Our lab team is dedicated to the pursuit of new knowledge about these fascinating and fundamentally important aspects of human nature.

Alex Wesnousky

Lab Coordinator

I am a senior Psychology and Classics double major here at Colby from Davis, California. I am interested in both clinical and social psychology, and am planning to pursue one of these areas in graduate school next year. I have spent the last two summers working at an autism and fragile X research clinic, and before that interned at a lab studying prejudice and discrimination. In my free time on campus I am involved in Colby Gymnastics and a CCAK mentor, and enjoy running on local trails. During the winter, I can be recognized as “that California kid” who can barely be seen beneath inordinate layers of jackets, scarves and sweaters.