Accurate and individualized social prediction
Our routine social lives are flush with information and demands. Navigating social situations requires more than passive reactions to the sights and sounds other people provide us. Rather, social savviness requires that we anticipate others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions with reasonable accuracy. To predict well, we need to understand how people think and behave in general, as well as how a specific interaction partner might deviate from such patterns. My research is concerned with whether people can refine their general social knowledge to make accurate predictions about specific individuals, as well as the consequences of accuracy, or the lack thereof.
Knowledge structures for quick social induction
Despite wide variation across individuals, people typically learn to accurately tailor their predictions of how a specific familiar partner’s thoughts and feelings might change over time. More remarkably, people manage to individuate their social predictions even for those with whom they only have very limited experiences. I combine probabilistic modeling and behavioral experiments to understand how structured mental representations might reflect statistical structures of the social world, seeking avenues by which we may rapidly extrapolate information about novel partners through inductive inference.
Social malleability of self-knowledge
Memory is notoriously pliable. When memories are recalled, they become subject to alteration without us ever knowing. By extension, the self-knowledge we’ve built upon our memories is also constantly molded by a plethora of influences. This line of research focuses on how the processes underlying social inferences can change our self-knowledge. When we interact with, or even just think about, other people, we often activate self-knowledge to anchor our inferences, and then adjust away from it by incorporating other information. In several collaborative projects, I have investigated how our self-knowledge might be sculpted by such social anchoring-and-adjustment.
Meghan Meyer, Sasha Brietzke, Jordan Rubin-McGregor, and I have shown that internally reasoning about others can change both our episodic and semantic self-knowledge to be more similar to our simulations of a social target. These changes can be extensive and lasting. Using fMRI and multivariate analyses, we have investigated the neural underpinning of this phenomenon.
Madalina Vlasceanu, Elizabeth McDevitt, and I examine how memory might be shaped by conversations. When we converse, we base our anticipations of the partner’s utterances on our own experiences. When our partner violates such expectations, it can actually weaken the pre-existing memories we drew upon. Using fMRI, we are exploring how the complex interplay between memory reinstatement, prediction error, and partner characteristics can shape our memory through social interactions.
