Social & Personality

Ours is a vigorous research and training program in social and personality psychology. The following topics show what we explore: 

• Artificial Intelligence 

• Assessment of Personality and Behavior  

• Attitudes  

• Autoimmune Disease 

• Computational Modeling 

• Emotion 

• Empathy 

• Geographic Psychology 

• Gut Microbiome 

• Judgment and Decision-Making 

• Morality 

• Personality 

• Prosocial Behavior 

• Psychology of Architecture 

• Social Cognition 

• Social Neuroscience 

• Social Signaling  

• The Self 

• Volatile Organic Compounds 

• Volatilome 

Questions we address in current projects are: 

• How can we best study individuals in the contexts of their daily lives? 

• What features determine what a physical place feels like? 

• How do we deliberately and inadvertently influence the places in which we dwell? 

• How do the places we are in affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? 

• How do we make sense of others’ negative actions?  

• What promotes prosocial actions towards others? 

• Why do people fall for misinformation and what could be done about it? 

• How do people make moral judgments about what is right or wrong? 

• How do attitudes form and change? 

• How can we help people soften the blow of social rejection?  

• How does brain activity inside the scanner relate to personality and behavior in everyday life? 

• How much of the brain activity associated with self, empathy, and social reward is the same versus distinct? 

• How do people understand others’ emotions? 

• How do machines “understand” people’s emotions? 

• How can we build safer and more ethical AI? 

• Do the gut and brain talk to each other? If so, does gut dysbiosis affect neuroinflammation? 

• Do chimpanzees use pheromones to communicate? If so, can we measure this communication by analyzing urine deposits?