Current Research Projects
Friendship
Friends let us live longer, happier, healthier, and more fulfilled lives. But, today, we still don't really understand how friendships work.
Our research aims to map the computational design of friendship psychology. Briefly, to have friends—and reap the associated benefits—people must solve an array of challenges (e.g., finding, making, competing for, keeping good, jettisoning poor friends). Our work (1) systematically identifies these friendship challenges and (2) tests predictions about how people solve them.
Our lab is also engaged in large-scale cross-cultural work to describe what friendship looks like across sex/gender, age, + other demographic + ecological features.
Women's social relationships
The mind contains a rich psychology replete with mechanisms responsive to recurrent challenges, some of which can diverge by sex/gender. Insofar as women confront sometimes distinct social terrain, women might also possess some distinct cognitive + behavioral repertoires for navigating it.
Our lab takes advantage of multidisciplinary means to describe those sometimes-distinct challenges that women face—particularly in social relationships with other women—to derive related predictions about how women navigate those challenges.
Reputation, information, + communication: Tactics for navigating interconnected social worlds
Social minds are sensitive to how other people see us. This sensitivity can influence the social information we seek (or share), the connections with make, + how we navigate our social relationships.
Our lab explores people's strategic navigation of their social worlds by investigating phenomena such as reputation, information-sharing, competition/aggression, + the subtle ways that people—and particularly people with 'lower power'—can act to ensure better treatment.
A new line of work here, led by David Pinsof, explores a novel theory of humor as a coordination device. We attempt to answers long-lived questions, such as: What do we find certain things funny? What does humor do?
Stereotyping + prejudice
Stereotyping, prejudice, + discrimination are at once the products of our social minds as well as hurdles in our social landscapes.
Our lab uncovers these phenomena. Much of our work here empirically describes people's stereotypes while at once assessing ground truth.
News & Links
UCLA Social Minds Lab
Current Research Projects
Many of our projects take place at the intersection of overlapping research projects that elucidate the fascinating ways that the social mind helps us actively create and strategically navigate our social worlds.
Friendship
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? How might this vary across cultures?
- Can a little jealousy actually be a "good" thing for friendships?
- Does venting about our friends have hidden friendship benefits?
- How many friends do women and men have?
- How does the mind integrate our myriad friend preferences to make friend choices?
- Do we ever want "mean" friends? And are there some sex differences in friendship preferences?
- Our work also suggests that finding friends can make people feel self-actualized--espeically among women.
Female cooperation & competition
Every woman has at least two stories: One about how she could not have survived without the support of a female friend; one about how a female friend broke her heart. We explore the often-overlooked complexities underlying women's social relationships with one another.
- Like men, women actively compete. We identify 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 other women are likely friends or foes?
- Might current conceptualizations of power and status assume male-biased defaults, thereby leading us to overlook sources power and status typically held by women? And might people use different cues to infer women's (versus men's) high status?
- Might some female-female aggression be "encrypted"--decipherable only be female aggressors and victims--and thereby more difficult for victims to punish?
- How might women--and other "less formidable" individuals--bargain for better treatment from others?
Stereotyping & prejudice
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? Does this hold across cultures? Across sexuality?
- What (really) drives stigma toward promiscuous women?
- How do people's body shapes--over and above their body sizes--affect fat stigma directed toward them as individuals, and how might this affect heavier women?
- How might our imperfect social perceptions of threats and opportunities translate into stereotypes and prejudice?
- How does the "OKness" of prejudices vary across relationships types?
(Ir)Religion, stereotyping & prejudice
Religious people are highly trusted--and even other atheists often distrust 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?
- What are the links between anti-abortion views, sexual strategies, and religiosity?
Reputation, information, and people: A social mind for navigating a social world
Our minds are sensitive to how other people see us, and this sensitivity can influence how we view other people, whom we condemn, how we navigate relationships, and whether and with whom we share information.
- How does the mind deal with contradictory information about others? (E.g., When a friend tells us someone else's secret, that friend is breaking someone else's trust but favoring us.)
- 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?
- How might we harm the reputations of others while avoiding revenge and retaliation for doing so?
How do ecological variables shape everyday life?
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.
Current Projects
Many of our projects take place at the intersection of overlapping research projects that elucidate the fascinating ways that the social mind helps us actively create and strategically navigate our social worlds.
Female cooperation & competition
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?
Friendship
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)?
- 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, we might want friends who are mean to our enemies.
- Our work suggests that striving for status and finding friends can make us feel self-actualized.
Stereotyping & prejudice
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?
Reputation, information, and people: A social mind for navigating a social world
Our minds are sensitive to how other people see us, and this sensitivity can influence how we view other people, whom we condemn, how we navigate relationships, and whether and with whom we share information.
- Shockingly, we don't yet know whether indirect aggression "works" the way it's theorized to. We assess the complicated possible costs to actors of indirect (versus direct) aggression.
- How does the mind deal with contradictory information about others? (E.g., When a friend tells us someone else's secret, that friend is breaking someone else's trust but favoring us.)
- Does liking the same person always make us feel closer to one another? Can it backfire?
- 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?
- How might we harm the reputations of others while avoiding revenge and retaliation for doing so?
(Ir)Religion, stereotyping & 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?
How do ecological variables shape everyday life?
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.
The social functions of emotion
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---and jealousy--and their often-triadic social functions.
