Dr Peter Hegarty

BA( Dub) PhD(Stanford)
Senior Lecturer
Deputy Head of Department

Research Interests

My interests cut across social psychology, the history of psychology and related fields.  Working in experimental, correlational, discursive, and content-analytic research idioms, I aim to describe reciprocal relationships between the culturally particular psychology of modern Western people’s thinking about sexuality and gender, and the history of modern Western gender and sexual science.   The point of this research is to torque what counts as ‘objective’ vs. ‘political’ theory, research, writing and method toward the perspectives held by those who survive in modern Western cultures in spite of the ways that our/their being gets ontologized, abnormalized, overlooked, or prompts the need for explanation by psychologists.

Selected Publications

Hegarty, P. (2009).  Toward an LGB-affirmative informed paradigm for children who break gender norms: A comment on Drummond et al. (2008) and Rieger et al. (2008).  Developmental Psychology, 45, 895-900.

Hegarty, P. & Golden, A.M. (2008).  Attributions about the controllability of stigmatized
traits: Antecedents or justifications of prejudice? Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 38, 1023-1044. 

Hegarty, P. (Ed.) (2007).  Power matters: Knowledge politics in the history of
psychology.  History of Psychology, 10, 75-226.  [Special Issue].

Hegarty, P. & Buechel, C. (2006).  Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA
articles, 1965-2004.  Review of General Psychology, 10, 377-389.
Read the Media Response here.

Hegarty , P., & Chryssochoou, X. (2005). Why “our” policies set the standard more than
“theirs”: Category norms and generalization between European Union countries.
Social Cognition, 23, 507-544.

Hegarty , P., Pratto, F., & Lemieux, A. (2004). Heterocentric norms and heterosexist
ambivalences: Drinking in Intergroup Discomfort. Group Processes and Intergroup
Relations, 7, 119-130.

Hegarty , P. (2003). Homosexual signs and heterosexual silences: Rorschach studies of male homosexuality from 1921 to 1967. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12, 400-423.
Hegarty , P. (2002). "It's not a choice, it's the way we're built:" Symbolic beliefs about sexual orientation in the United States and in Britain. Journal of Community and Applied
Social Psychology, 12, 1-14.

Hegarty , P., & Pratto, F. (2001). The effects of category norms and stereotypes on
explanations of intergroup differences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
80, 723-735.   

Hegarty , P., & Chase, C. (2000). Intersexed activism, feminism, and psychology: Opening a dialogue on theory, research, and practice. Feminism & Psychology, 10, 107-122.
This article was reprinted in this edited collection.

Pratto, F., & Hegarty, P. (2000).  The political psychology of reproductive strategies. 
Psychological Science, 11, 57-62.
Read the Media Response here.

Hegarty , P. (1997). Materializing the hypothalamus: A performative account of the ‘gay
brain.’ Feminism & Psychology, 7 , 355-372.

CV (Including full publication list).

Current Doctoral Students

Toni Brennan: Charlotte Wolff: Then and now.

Orla Parslow: Experiences of lesbians involved in elder care.

Dan Shepperd: Friendships between gay men and heterosexual Women: Discourse analytic studies.

Departmental Responsibilities.

Deputy Head of Department/Head of Teaching
Space Officer

Current External Responsibilities

Co-Convenor:

University of Michigan Summer Institute in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and    Transgender Psychology.
Read attendee Jeffrey Adams’ account of the 2008 Summer Institute in this issue of the Australian journal Gay and Lesbian Issues in Psychology Review.

Committee Member:

British Psychological Society History and Philosophy of Psychology Section

Consulting Editor:

History of Psychology

Editorial Board Member:

Psychology and Sexuality

For teaching materials click here.