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Jill Egeth |
A Focus on Group Motivation
Jill Egeth
March 2009
Whether her research focuses on improving government emergency response plans or investigating emerging issues in political psychology, MITRE lead behavioral scientist Jill Egeth is always thinking about what makes people tick.
Egeth, a social psychologist who has investigated topics such as improving communication between doctors and patients, is fascinated by the psychology of individuals and groups. This interest drives her MITRE career as an investigator into trends in the behavioral and social sciences. Her work, a mix of company-sponsored research and government-sponsored projects, aims to shed new light on how individuals and groups interact with and influence each other and their social environments, and to help sponsors benefit from such insights.
"I love being able to apply my scientific background in social and health psychology to real-world problems of national importance," Egeth says. Her current research assesses U.S. citizens' perceptions about how to respond to a major disease outbreak.
Building More Effective Emergency Response Plans
Armed with this information, MITRE's public-health sponsors can develop improved emergency-response plans to increase compliance with public-safety directives during a disaster such as a rapidly spreading pandemic, Egeth explains.
"Today, government emergency-response plans are based on an incomplete understanding of citizens' beliefs about contagious diseases such as influenza," she says. These beliefs, known in health psychology parlance as "health cognitions," have a significant impact on people's health-related behaviors, such as taking needed medications, using seat belts, and getting mammograms and other screening tests.
"We have national emergency-preparedness and response plans for 15 different disaster scenarios, but the success of these plans depends on people's understanding of related health issues and their likely responses," she adds. "To understand, predict, and modify health behaviors and outcomes, we need to learn more about underlying health cognitions."
In the pandemic influenza example, people's likely responses to an outbreak can be more accurately predicted with an increased understanding of their perceptions. People have widely differing opinions of how susceptible they are to falling ill, to the severity of the outbreak, and of the potential benefits of steps such as taking medications or wearing face masks in public.
The goals of her research are to develop a preliminary methodology for assessing emergency preparedness and response cognitions; use online surveys (first among MITRE employees and then using a national sample) to collect data on health cognitions; and to analyze the survey data to create recommendations for modifying existing emergency-response plans. Egeth and her research partners hope to refine their findings into a methodology that could later be used to assess health cognitions applicable to other disaster scenarios, she says.
A Career that Blends Research and Teaching
Egeth came to MITRE after five years as a science policy analyst. This background, combined with her Ph.D. in social and health psychology, positioned her well for her current role in our Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. She also had several years of experience teaching graduate-level classes at the Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies. When she joined the company, she hoped to continue her association with Johns Hopkins and to use her teaching skills on the job—and she's managed to do both.
"One of my 'hobbies' is teaching," Egeth notes. "Many companies would not have been supportive of my interest in teaching evening classes at Johns Hopkins, but MITRE supports and encourages this sort of interaction with the academic community. I achieve personal satisfaction from my teaching, but I've also found that it provides me with opportunities for continuous learning that are often applicable to my MITRE work."
She currently teaches graduate-level classes at Johns Hopkins in the psychology of persuasion and communication, political psychology, health psychology and behavior change, and the psychology of terror. This work has blended well with her other research interests at MITRE, she adds.
"It's possible to take health psychology theories that help us understand why some people fail to follow medical advice and to modify those theories to explain other group-organized behaviors, such as politically motivated violence," Egeth says. "I always find it exciting when I can make new connections between, for example, health psychology theories that predict illness behaviors, and an important national issue that otherwise has little relation to health psychology."
Working Directly with Intelligence Analysts
Another important element of Egeth's work at MITRE is a course she teaches for government intelligence analysts on the topic of exercising collaborative analysis. Developed by MITRE, the seminar draws on her research background and includes exercises to help analysts improve their collaboration skills and benefit from lessons learned in managing ongoing threats. The course also teaches about novel methods for integrating scientific expertise into their work.
"My work program at MITRE is a nice mix of research-oriented and applied work," she says. "One of the things I like most about working here is having the opportunity to interact with other types of scientists. The collaboration between different disciplines lets you explore avenues of research that you wouldn't otherwise, if you only worked with people with similar backgrounds.
"I have the freedom to pursue topics that are intellectually stimulating while also making concrete, measurable progress on nationally relevant work programs."
—by Maria S. Lee
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