What are we working on now?
What is the role of harm or suffering in punishment? Past work has argued that punishers are primarily driven by retributive motives, suggesting that punishers like to harm for harm’s sake. But what if some punishers believe that suffering is critical for learning, and that transgressors only learn from punishments that are harmful? In this work we are investigating beliefs about the instrumental role of suffering in punishment.
How do people really feel about interracial marriage? Despite the fact that interracial marriage has been legal for decades, interracial relationships are extremely rare. One possible explanation for the tendency to date or marry within racial or ethnic group is a lack of opportunity. Individuals tend to live near and socialize with members of their own racial or ethnic group. Additionally, it may be that people hold unconscious, implicit bias against interracial relationships. In this work we investigate this second possibility and how implicit bias towards interracial relationships reflects explicit attitudes and actual behavior.
Extortion sounds exotic but it happens all the time. Consider the unruly passenger who refuses to board the plane until they receive a free upgrade. Given its ubiquity, it’s likely that each of us has engaged with an extorter at some point. But how do we know when we are being extorted? In this work, we look at subtle behavioral cues that might reveal that a cooperative partner is behaving extortionately and how we respond when we believe we are dealing with an extorter.
When engaging in social interactions, particularly with someone we don’t know well, we have to quickly make guesses about the kind of person we are dealing with, and often with limited information. For example, imagine you are buying a used bike off of facebook marketplace. You may have just a few online interactions with the seller before you have to decide if they can be trusted or if they are trying to cheat you. We might be tempted to endlessly gather information about the seller, but at some point we must make a decision to either more forward with the deal or walk away. How do we know when we have enough information to decide? On the one hand, making decisions about others’ intentions, motives, or characters feels very unique to social interactions. On the other, this type of decision making shares many features with non-social probabilistic judgment. In this work, we seek to identify the cognitive processes common to both social and non-social probabilistic decision making.
When I ask you what you would most like to have for dinner tonight, a few options probably quickly comes to mind. Typically, this “choice set” is generated automatically and is comprised of the foods we usually like or frequently have. In fact, research has shown that choice sets are almost always automatically populated with typically good options. But what if I asked you would you would least like to have for dinner tonight. Now the typically good options (your favorite foods) or not good answers for this scenario. In this work we investigate how the brain solves problems like these: What happens in our brains when typically good options are not appropriate for the current context during choice set generation?