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, religious cognition, egocentric biases, prejudice, and prefrontal cortex function.