Social Cognition and Person Perception
People are remarkably good at making social inferences from minimal information. A brief glimpse at a person’s face or witnessing a single behavior is sufficient to trigger inferences about the person. Often these inferences are unintentional and highly efficient. In my lab, we study the nature of these inferences. What are the automatic and controlled components of person inferences? What are the implications of these inferences? Are unintentional person inferences accurate? What about inferences from faces? Could we overwrite initial impressions? We are interested not only in the cognitive processes but also in the neural mechanisms underlying such inferences. Research projects include both behavioral and brain imaging experiments.

Judgment and Decision Making
Human judgment and decision-making is highly context specific. This dependence on context rarely produces stable coherent preferences as the rational agent theory has it. In my lab, we study the conditions under which people’s decisions deviate from normative or ‘rational’ expectations. When do we suffer from illusions of knowledge - looking for additional information, which hurts the accuracy of our predictions while at the same time increases our confidence? We are also interested in the policy implications of descriptive models of human judgment and decision-making.