Research in our lab is focused on the relationship between
the individual's cognition and their social environment to understand the
processes that may lead to the manifestation of interpersonal and social
biases. Drawing from a range of approaches, we primarily employ quantitative
methods to explore social phenomena. Current topics of investigation include:
Interpersonal Cognition
How does cognition support smooth and fluid social interactions? Such mechanisms as social prediction, perspective-taking, and imitation facilitate our ability to respond spontaneously to others.
Processing information in a more holistic or more piecemeal
manner has been established to influence a wide variety of decisions,
judgments, and impressions. Such an influence may extend to the understanding
of news events and the recollection of social encounters, and it may interact
with other culture-specific processing dimensions.
Cognitive consequences of social
exclusion
Experiencing social exclusion not only leads to decreases in
self-esteem and positive mood, but also shifts in attention and memory.
Moreover, engaging in social exclusion has also consequences for
those who are excluding. Strangers who exclude will like each other more,
perceive themselves as more similar to each other, and show evidence of
self-other assimilation. Thus, social exclusion may serve an important function
in the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.
Category perception and social
contact
Our knowledge about social groups and categories may
influence social judgement through multiple mechanisms (e.g. attention,
priming) and subject to a number of conditions (e.g. affect, status,
interaction goals). These determinants of group perception may sometimes hinder
social contact, or they may facilitate processing and interaction.
Associative biases in social
attitudes
Our social attitudes rely on what we have learned about
social groups. However, our learning abilities are limited by the mechanisms
that we use to associate experience to social categories. If our process of
knowledge acquisition is inaccurate, our group representations will be
distorted and our social judgement will be biased.
Affect in social interaction
One’s
representation of the social world in many cases involves not only what
one knows, but also how one feels about people. Often the social
environment is strongly associated with powerful emotions, and one’s predominant
response to it may in fact be affective in nature. In such cases, one’s
affective response to social encounters may be a significant predictor of one’s
behavioural responses as much or more as one's cognitive representations.
Natalie Wyer | Guglielmo Calvini | Chris Longmore | Sabine Pahl |Kimberley Schenke | Siew Hong Tan | Jaysan Charlesford
