JONATHAN DORISCAR

Hi, I’m Jonathan Doriscar, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology and a master’s student in Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University. Before Northwestern, I earned my BA in Psychology with a minor in Composition & Rhetoric from Knox College.

My research examines racial moral inflection points—moments when historical racial hierarchies collide with present-day evidence of harm or change, forcing individuals and publics to choose between defense and repair. I study how people interpret these moments, tracing the emotions and narratives that either justify inequality or acknowledge harm and support reform. To do this, I combine computational analyses of digital discourse with experiments and qualitative approaches.

My projects span contexts such as public reactions to police violence, online debates about racial demographic change, and responses to personal bias feedback. Across these lines of work, I aim to explain why some encounters with racial injustice deepen polarization while others open pathways to acknowledgment, reform, and coalition.

Research Overview

At the heart of my research is a simple but powerful question: what happens when people reach a moral crossroads?

Moments of racial harm or social change often force individuals and publics to decide—defend the existing order or move toward repair. Sometimes these encounters provoke denial and polarization; other times they open space for acknowledgment, solidarity, and reform. My work aims to understand why.

I approach this question through the study of racial moral inflection points—the junctures where historical hierarchies collide with present evidence of injustice. At these points, emotion and identity converge to shape interpretation: some responses justify or minimize harm, while others acknowledge and transform it. These decisions, repeated across people and platforms, define whether societies learn from moral disruption or repeat it.

PUBLICATIONS

*Vallabha, S., Doriscar, J. E., & Brandt, M. J. (2024). When the specter of the past haunts current groups: Psychological antecedents of historical blame. Journal of personality and social psychology, 10.1037/pspi0000452. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000452
McAndrew, F. T., Doriscar, J. E., *Schmidt, N. T., & Niebauer, C. (2024). Explorations in Creepiness: Tolerance for Ambiguity and Susceptibility to “Not Just Right Experiences” Predict the Ease of Getting “Creeped Out.” The Journal of Psychology, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2024.2366882
Farrer, B., Holahan, R., Allen, K., Allen, L., Doriscar, J. E., Johnson, V., ... & Smith, S. (2024). Assessing how energy companies negotiate with landowners when obtaining land for hydraulic fracturing. Nature Energy, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-024-01601-y
Perry, S. P., Abaied, J. L., Wu, D. J., & Doriscar, J. E. (2024). Racial Socialization in the United States. Annual review of psychology, 10.1146/annurev-psych-050724-034006. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-050724-034006
Doriscar, J.E., Mamakos, M., Perry, S.P., Charlesworth, T.“From Data to Discovery: Unsupervised Machine Learnings Role in Social Cognition” (In press; Journal of Social Cognition)