Russell Fazio is Harold E. Burtt Professor of Social Psychology at Ohio State University, where he heads Russ's Attitude and Social Cognition Lab (RASCL). Fazio's work focuses on social psychological phenomena like attitude formation and change, the relationship between attitudes and behavior, and the automatic and controlled cognitive processes that guide social behavior. Education and academic career Russell Fazio received his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University in 1974, where he graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving his Master of Arts in 1976 followed by his Doctor of Philosophy in social psychology in 1978. In 1978, Fazio became an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University and in 1981, he became an associate professor at the same institution. In 1985, he became a professor of psychology and cognitive science, still at Indiana University. He was a visiting professor at the University of Exeter in 1997. In 2001, he moved to Ohio State University, becoming a distinguished professor of social and behavioral sciences in the Department of Psychology. Since 2002, Fazio has been at Ohio State University as the Harold E. Burtt Chair in Psychology. He also runs a lab called RASCL (Russ’ Attitude and Social Cognition Lab) at Ohio State. Research Attitude formation Fazio proposed that people developed attitudes toward novel objects through exploration. An exploratory behavior refers to a novel response when a learner tries to discover which actions produce which outcomes in order to achieve rewards or avoid punishment. Fazio et al., designed a novel bean game, in which some beans had associated positive values and some had negative values. Participants must decide whether to eat the bean or avoid it. They found out that subjects had learned the valence of outcomes to be expected for various types of beans during exploration and formed attitudes would generalize to other novel stimuli. Subjects showed better learning for negative beans than for positive beans and then these negative attitudes had a greater effect on generalization. Fazio referred it as "valence asymmetries”. Fazio also conducted research on implicit attitude formation via classical conditioning. In the evaluation task after subjects were exposed to multiple valenced unconditioned stimulus (US) and novel neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) pairs, subjects rated more positively for the CS paired with positive items than for the CS paired with negative items. Subjects were unaware