About

easp02@hamline.edu / erik-asp@uiowa.edu

Google Scholar page / ResearchGate page / Hamline page

Background and Education

I am a Professor of Psychology at Hamline University.  I also hold a secondary research appointment in the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa.  I am the director of the Wesley and Lorene Artz Cognitive Neuroscience Research Center.

I received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Iowa in 2012 under the guidance of Dr. Daniel Tranel.  My dissertation developed and tested the False Tagging Theory (FTT), a neuroanatomical model of the mechanisms of belief and doubt, which garnered the University of Iowa’s Graduate Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2014.  I have also done postdoctoral research with Dr. John T. Cacioppo at the University of Chicago and Dr. Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa.  In 2017, I was named a Global Expert on Debunking Misinformation by the University of Bristol.  In 2024, I was honored with Hamline University’s prestigious John Wesley Trustee Award, given to a faculty member “who consistently demonstrates the university’s core values of high-quality and rigorous academics, a commitment to make the world a better place, and a focus on ethics, civility, and social justice.”

Research Interests

My central research interests concern the neural substrates of belief and doubt, misinformation vulnerability, egocentric biases, prejudice, and prefrontal cortex function.