I study how people construct judgments of their social world. I am interested in the "building blocks" we use to form attitudes and make decisions about the people and things around us, and how we organize this information.

One current line of research investigates how people make decisions between options with shared and unique characteristics, specifically examining how people treat these two kinds of characteristics differently, and how this affects their comparisons. When people try to decide between two options that have both shared and unique characteristics, they match up the shared attributes and concentrate on the unique ones to make their choice. I am studying what happens when they are subsequently given a third option. People appear to cancel out the shared features in earlier options, and do not use them in making subsequent decisions. I am also examining decision contexts that may inhibit or prevent the use of feature matching as a judgment strategy, and whether feature matching is used in self/other comparisons.

What does it mean to take another person's perspective? I'm interested in both cognitive outcomes of perspective taking (e.g., empathic accuracy) as well as affective ones (how does it affect our relationship with the person whose perspective we took?). Most recently, I have been looking at how similarity of experience and motivation affect empathy. I am also intrigued by how fiction writers take their characters' perspectives, which I view as a special case of perspective taking, in which the perspective must be totally constructed, rather than simply "taken."

If we are really looking forward to a vacation but it turns out to be rather disappointing, will we later remember and evaluate the vacation negatively, or will our memories and evaluations be boosted by our initially positive expectations such that we remember the vacation as being better than it actually was? How much we expect to enjoy something and what we think it will be like can influence later evaluations of the event as well as decisions about whether or not we decide to repeat the experience. It appears that people are often guided by their positive expectations, even when these expectations conflict with actual experiences, but it is not clear whether negative expectations operate in a parallel way.