UVA Batten’s Gerald Higginbotham has recently received a major, three-year National Science Foundation grant to establish a community support network for early-career Black social and personality psychologists.

Research is not a solo activity for Gerald Higginbotham. “I think the best ideas come out of talking with other people,” he says.

A social psychologist, Higginbotham pays particular attention to the people and circumstances that make an individual person’s beliefs or actions possible. That could mean the history behind a particular social attitude — or the fact that his early mentors have played a key role in his own research approach and success. Acknowledging the latter “is not a threat to me, how I see myself, or the importance of the work,” he says. 

In his first year as a professor at the Batten School, Higginbotham has put this philosophy into practice. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at the school for two years, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor of public policy in fall 2023. Soon after, he established a new lab. Through his work there and in the classroom, Higginbotham has advanced the conversations on tough subjects such as gun ownership, identity politics and racism. And he has done so in close collaboration with others, fostering both a sense of community and a sensitivity to historical context.

Thinking from multiple perspectives

Higginbotham can vividly remember the lab where he worked at Stanford University. Undergraduates like himself had the chance to collaborate with senior researchers Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Hazel Rose Markus and Rebecca Hetey in a dynamic and cooperative space. Informal conversations frequently sparked ideas for new research directions.   “I wanted to create a place like that, where work is getting done, but also learning and community are happening,” he says. 

The result was Batten’s new CHIP Lab (an acronym for culture, history, identity and policy). CHIP produces rigorous scholarship on cultural attitudes about a range of intersecting issues, including gun control, gun rights, voting and race. In the lab, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers pilot ideas for possible investigation and solicit feedback from their peers through biweekly meetings. They also learn about the trajectory of the research process and engage in professional development, workshopping their CVs and resumes.

The problems that the lab explores are some of America’s most intractable ones, and conversations about them can be highly charged. But Batten’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Eileen Chou, who shared a building with the new lab this year, praises how Higginbotham approaches these issues with lab participants.

“He’s not afraid of taking time to pause and think. He's not afraid of silence,” Chou says. “He tries to think from multiple perspectives before jumping to a conclusion. Understanding where people are coming from is crucial to move this kind of research forward, and he takes the time to do that. He's not trying to push a particular agenda.”

A historical view

Higginbotham says the lab’s work requires a keen attention to the past. “In social psychology, we talk about how context matters for human behavior. But sometimes we get stuck in thinking about more immediate context,” he explains. 

This year, Higginbotham published a paper that revisits previous research, including one of his own studies. For that investigation, Higginbotham and his colleagues surveyed more than 850 people. The researchers found that after reading an article reporting that Black people were obtaining concealed carry permits at a higher rate, White people whose attitudes were measured as “racially resentful” expressed lower support for concealed carry laws.  The results confirmed other findings that “White Americans associate gun rights with White people and gun control with Black people,” Higginbotham says.

His new paper took a longer, more historical view of the issue, from “colonial America to the Antebellum period through Jim Crow,” he says. For example, the paper outlines how the findings of Higginbotham’s previous study and others echo events of the 1960s, when California conservatives made the uncharacteristic move to pass a bill that abolished open carry of loaded firearms. The decision was made in reaction to the Black Panthers, who carried guns to protect their neighborhoods from police brutality,

Higginbotham hopes that the paper will influence future studies in his field. To fully comprehend the forces that shape gun rights policies, researchers need to think beyond the usual ways gun ownership is portrayed, he argues.

“Yes, the history of firearms is about people using them to hunt and do sports,” he explains. “But they have also been a tool used to dominate and oppress other groups. That’s an important part of the history, even if it’s a hard uncomfortable truth, and it's vital to understand.”

Connecting with Charlottesville

This year, Higginbotham asked his students to take on such uncomfortable truths in a class on identity politics. For their capstone projects, students focused on the history of policies that impacted Charlottesville and the surrounding area. With help from architectural historian Louis Nelson and special collections curator Krystal Appiah, students researched everything from the relationship between tree canopy cover and equity to the effect of rising housing costs on elderly residents.

“I learned so much and so did the students,” Higginbotham says. “They were able to think about the space that they've lived in for four years in a different way.”

Higginbotham also forged his own connections with the wider Charlottesville community when he presented his research at a meeting of Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia. Afterward, members started chatting with him about his ancestry, asking him questions and ultimately helping him discover that he was related to multiple Tuskegee airmen.

“They were educating me on my own family history. It was beautiful,” he says.

When discussing his accomplishments from the past year, Higginbotham is quick to direct the attention away from himself and toward his gratitude for others. It was the conversations with his colleagues, mentors and students and with people in the broader community that helped him better reflect on what kind of lab he wanted to create, what he wanted to focus on in his research, and the patterns unfolding in the city he has decided to call home. 

In other words, everything he has done his first year at Batten could not be done alone, he says: “I stand on the shoulders of so many people.”

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UVA Batten follows the AP style guide. For this article, we have capitalized both "White" and" Black" at Professor Higginbotham's request  to convey  the identity message central to his research.