Jamie Hughes

Jamie S. Hughes is a Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at The Chicago School, Dallas Campus. She earned her Ph.D. in Experimental and Social Psychology from New Mexico State University in 2010 and built the first part of her career at The University of Texas Permian Basin. There she chaired the Department of Psychology for four years, chaired the Institutional Review Board for seven, and received the UT System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award. She later joined the Applied Psychology faculty at Fielding Graduate University, where she continues to serve as a dissertation advisor. Across these institutions she has mentored undergraduate and graduate students through research projects from first question to final analysis, with a particular focus on survey design, measurement, and statistics.

Dr. Hughes is a social psychologist who studies person perception and moral judgment. Put simply, she is interested in how people decide that someone is good or bad, and how they reach that conclusion quickly and with little information. These judgments help people navigate their social world, but in a courtroom or a policy debate, the same shortcuts can produce unfair outcomes. Much of her research follows this tension into the criminal legal system: how jurors weigh character and evidence, how the public perceives people who are incarcerated, and what shapes support for rehabilitation and prison reform. Her current work also draws on significance quest theory and identity fusion to examine how a person's need to matter, and their sense of oneness with a group, shape what they are willing to do on its behalf. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and received grant funding that includes support from the National Science Foundation.