Jordan LaBouff

Associate Professor of Psychology and Honors
Williams Hall 352

Dr. LaBouff is a social psychologist with a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Baylor University, 2011). He has a joint appointment between the Psychology Department and the Honors College and focuses on undergraduate engagement in research.

Research Interests:
My research focuses on how people’s religious identities and beliefs impact how they interact with one another. Every major world religion includes a call to sacrifice on behalf of others, and religious identities and beliefs promote some of the very best of human behavior (e.g., generosity, charity, gratitude, etc.). However, religious identities and beliefs are also associated with some of the very worst of human behavior (e.g., prejudice, discrimination, and violence. My goal is to understand the things that promote the “light side” of religious identities and beliefs, and the things that reduce the “dark side.”

Why I Teach in Honors:
Teaching in honors is a unique joy! I love our small and focused classes that let me get to know each student, their perspective, and get to hear their individual experiences with our texts at a personal level. My favorite thing is to watch students develop over the course of the curriculum in their thoughts about themselves, their central values, and how they write about what they think.

Honors Involvement: I regularly lecture in the Civilizations sequence on Freud and Weber, and have led a few different honors tutorials – one where we created a podcast on the scientific study of religion, and another where we used board games to investigate storytelling.

Selected Publications:

  1. Van Cappellen, P., & LaBouff J. P., (2020) The other half of religious intergroup prejudice: Prejudice toward Christians and Atheists among members of nonreligious groups. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.
  2. O’Connell, C., McKinnon, M., & LaBouff, J. P. (2020). One size does not fit all: Gender implications for the design of outcomes, evaluation, and assessment of science communication programs. Journal of Science Communication.
  3. Carpenter, T. P., Pogacar, R., Pullig, C., Kouril, M., Aguilar, S., LaBouff J. P., Isenberg, N., & Chakroff, A. (2019). The viability and validity of survey-based implicit association tests: A methodological and empirical analysis. Behavioral Research Methods.
  4. Sharp, C. A, Shariff, A. F., & LaBouff, J. P. (2019). Religious complexity and intergroup bias. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
  5. Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., Haggard, M. C., LaBouff, J. P., & Rowatt, W. C. (2019). Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge. The Journal of Positive Psychology
  6. Wesselmann, E. D., & LaBouff J. P. (2018). Sympathy for the devil: Moral convictions, emotions, and struggles. In Langle, T. (Ed.). Daredevil psychology: The devil you know. New York: Sterling.
  7. LaBouff, J. P., Shen, M. J. & Humphreys, M (2017). Religiosity and group-binding moral concerns. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 39, 263-282.
  8. Shen, M. J., & LaBouff, J. P. (2016). Who’s for universalized health care?: A confirmatory factor analysis of health care attitudes and predictors of favoring universal health care among americans. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 4, 493-520.
  9. LaBouff, J. P., & LeDoux, A. (2016). Imagining atheists: Reducing fundamental distrust in anti-atheist attitudes. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.