Steven M. Smith, PhD.

Biography     

Dr. Smith obtained his BA in psychology from Bishop's University and his MA and Ph.D. from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Dr. Smith began his faculty position at Saint Mary's in the summer of 2000, and started as Dean of Science in 2011. Dr. Smith's research interests include attitudes and persuasion, psychology and law, the role of human factors in decision making, and how these issues relate to health behaviours.



Overview of Research Interests

​Broadly speaking, my research interests fall into the major categories of attitudes, social memory processes, and group decision making. I am interested in both the basic psychological issues related to these areas, as well as how they can be applied to real-world settings, particularly in health and legal settings.

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In my research in the attitudes area, I have attempted to advance our understanding of how the cognitive structural underpinnings of attitudes impact on how individuals perceive their own attitudes, how attitudes affect attitude-behaviour consistency, as well as basic persuasion and compliance processes. I have explored these processes in a number of subject areas, but recently, I have focused on people’s health attitudes and various aspects of health behaviour and health promotion.

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My social memory research has focused on understanding how attitudes bias social memory and how we can distinguish between accurate and inaccurate social memories. I have focused on eyewitness memory for criminal events, as well as exploring the role of the media and communication in individual and group decision making processes. How can we improve group communication to facilitate and improve group decision making, especially in situations (e.g., juries, aviation, medical teams) where errors can be and often are catastrophic? Most recently, along with colleagues, I have been exploring legal policy issues.

Department of Psychology, Saint Mary's University