51cg

Biography

Devin Ray is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the 51cg, where he has been based since 2013. He earned his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. Diane Mackie, and held a postdoctoral position in Prof Kai Sassenberg's group at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tübingen, Germany, before moving to Aberdeen.

His research examines how everyday social cognition shapes relationships between people and between groups. A central strand of his recent work concerns the psychology of being forgotten — how memory and forgetting act as signals of interpersonal importance in close relationships and in the workplace. He has also published on intergroup emotion and prejudice, the effects of social categorization on face recognition, and how social comparison influences knowledge sharing during collaborative learning. 

Research Overview

Overview

I study how everyday social cognition shapes relationships both between people, and between groups. My work asks what follows from three ordinary acts: what we remember about one another, how we categorise one another, and how we compare ourselves to others.

Interpersonal memory and the experience of being forgotten

Remembering the details of a past interaction signals that the interaction, and the people in it, mattered. Being forgotten signals the opposite. My main current line of research treats memory and forgetting as interpersonal signals of importance, and follows the consequences into ongoing relationships. Being forgotten reliably damages relational closeness; the damage persists even when a benign explanation for the forgetting is available; and people can deliberately display memory in order to convey value to others. I have pursued these questions in personal and professional settings, using both laboratory and field methods.

Social categorisation, identity, and memory for people

How we categorise other people shapes both our perception of them and our ability to recognise them later. I have shown that belonging to more than one social category at once alters how faces are recognised, that cross-group recognition bias extends well beyond faces to the varied ways identity is represented online, and that mere uncertainty about someone's category is enough to undermine later recognition of their face.

Intergroup emotion and prejudice

Working within intergroup emotions theory, my early work focused on how shifts in self-categorisation change the emotions people feel toward outgroups, and why discrete emotions — rather than global evaluations — explain the effects of crossed categorisation on prejudice. The central theme of this work is that specific emotions, as opposed to global evaluations, are the more informative unit of analysis for understanding, and potentially reducing, intergroup conflict.

Social comparison, knowledge sharing, and learning

During my postdoctoral work at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tübingen (now the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien), I examined how social comparison shapes collaborative learning. Learners who know they compare unfavourably with a partner give poorer explanations; awareness of what a partner already knows can either motivate or discourage engagement; and habitual social comparison leads learners to choose their learning partners poorly.

Applied collaborations

Alongside this core work, I collaborate on applied questions in adjacent areas, including safety culture and professional identity among helicopter pilots, emotion and weight regulation, and the social motivations behind language use.

Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in interpersonal memory and/or social categorisation.

Teaching Responsibilities

My lectures are concentrated in Year 2 of our program. I provide all of the lectures in PS2018, Advanced Psychology 1 - Methods and Applications, which give our undergraduates an in-depth, yet accessible, introduction to inferential statistics. I further deliver the Social Psychology lectures in PS2517, Advanced Psychology B - Concepts and Theory. 

In addition to lectures, I deliver small group instruction in various tutorials and supervise undergraduate and MSc theses. I also lead or serve on the supervisory team of MRes and PhD students.