SOCIAL & EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY LAB

Every woman has at least two stories: One about how she could not have survived without the support of a female friend, and one about how a female friend broke her heart. We investigate the often-overlooked complexities underlying women's social relationships with one another.

• Like men, women actively compete. We explore ways that women might avoid the often high costs of other women's aggression (e.g., via perceptual biases, strategic behavior)--and the impact this might have on women's psychology and physiology.
• How do women meet the challenge of discerning whether women are likely friends or foes?
• What forms does women's status competition take, and is it effective?
• Might current conceptualizations of power and status assume male-biased defaults, thereby leading us to overlook sources power and status typically held by women?
• Compared to men, are women less likely to form same-sex friendships across status boundaries--and why?

Our friends make us happy, keep us healthy, and can even promote our reproductive fitness. But friendships remain understudied in social psychology. We explore these important bonds.

• Does "friendship jealousy" protect our friendships, and motivate us to guard our friends? What are the sex similarities and differences in friendship jealousy?
• Can a little jealousy be a "good" thing for friendships?
• How many friends do women and men have? 
• How does the mind integrate our myriad friend preferences to make actual friend choices? And might we sometimes want surprising traits in our friends (e.g., meanness)?
• Does liking the same person always make us feel closer to one another? Can it backfire?
• Our work suggests that striving for status and finding friends can make us feel self-actualized.

We use a functional approach to stigma to revolutionize our understanding of classic research in social psychology.

• (Why) Do people stereotype women (but not men) who have casual sex as having low self-worth?
• What (really) drives the stigma toward promiscuous women?
• How does the "OKness" of prejudice affect our social relationships?
• Do specific threats transfer in stigma-by-association?
• Beyond BMI, fat stigma results from a complex perceptual calculus that involves different fats (often stored in different places on the body). How do people's body shapes affect stigma directed toward them, and what affordances do different bodily shape cue?
• How might our imperfect social perceptions of threats and opportunities translate into stereotypes and prejudice?

Religious people are highly trusted--and even other atheists often dislike atheists. Some religious people are also likely to hold negative perceptions of gays, women's reproductive rights, recreational drugs. Why?

• Our work suggests that atheists are distrusted because they are seen as sexually uncommitted, building a body of work suggesting that sexual strategies lead us to religions (and not vice versa).
• Do people ever possess positive stereotypes about atheists?
• Which individual-level traits drive anti-atheist prejudice?
• Can displaying cues of religiosity mitigate (some) stigmatization?

Income inequality is a strong predictor of violence. Does increasing income inequality also change the ways that women compete? How does pathogen prevalence affect the job market?

• Do social perceivers have "accurate" expectations about the behavior of people in different ecological circumstances (e.g.., resource-scarce vs. resource-rich environments, environments with harsher vs. mild climates, environments characterized by high vs. low pathogens)?
• Our work suggests that different ecological factors shape different types of violence.
• How does relational mobility affect women's and men's friendship processes?
• Our work on music suggests that greater information saturation in an environment can lead us to prefer simpler information.
• Our goal of caring for kin is highly important to people across cultures--even as many researchers sometimes overlook this motivation. 

Our minds are sensitive to how other people see us, and this sensitivity can influence whom we condemn, how we navigate relationships, and whether and with whom we share information.

• Do we ever want "mean" friends? When we talk about our ideal social partners, we often think about how they would behave toward us. Just as we might want friends who are loyal to us (and not to others), we might want friends who are mean to our enemies (but not to us). 
• We often have contradictory information about other people---our friends might tell us someone else's secret, for example. So is that friend trustworthy? They betrayed a secret, so perhaps not. They demonstrated loyalty to us in that betrayal, though, so perhaps they are. We explore how the mind makes these complex inferences.
• We might enjoy reputational boosts when we condemn other people--but how do people view us when we try to understand both sides of controversies?
• Artifacts (e.g., songs, films, paintings) are unchanging, but the reputations of the people that made them are not. How does the mind evaluate art made by transgressors?

A "disgust" sound is a most recognizable emotional vocalization. What would you do If someone made that sound at you, or looked at you with disgust? What if a friend looked at you with disgust--and did so just after someone you both found annoying entered the room? We're exploring disgust expressions and their often-triadic social functions