I am interested in social cognition and judgment and decision-making research. In my lab, we use a variety of methods: from behavioral experiments and computer modeling to brain imaging experiments. People are remarkably good at making social inferences from minimal information. I investigate how people form impressions of individuals (including political candidates) based on mere seconds of exposure to their faces and behavior. A brief glimpse at a person’s face or witnessing a single behavior, it turns out, is often sufficient to trigger inferences about the person. In the social cognition and social neuroscience lab, we study the nature of these inferences and ask questions like: What are the automatic and controlled components of person inferences? What are the implications of these inferences? Are unintentional person inferences accurate? Could we overwrite initial impressions? I am also interested in understanding the conditions under which people’s decisions deviate from normative or ‘rational’ expectations. The policy implications of descriptive models of human judgment and decision-making are critical to my research.