My Research
When you imagine a Republican, what kind of person comes to mind? For many people, that label evokes a broader image: someone who is Christian, rural, wealthy, or Southern. My research examines how people draw social inferences from limited information and how those inferences shape person perception, moral judgment, and intergroup relations.
A central theme of my work is that people often reason about others through broader social structures rather than isolated identities. As political, religious, and other social identities become increasingly aligned, membership in one group can become a cue to a much broader social coalition, encouraging people to infer additional identities, motives, and moral characteristics from limited information. Understanding when and why people rely on these "mental maps" of the social world, and how they shape stereotyping, prejudice, and polarization, is a central goal of my research.
Below, I highlight three primary lines of work that reflect my broader research program on how people make sense of the social world from limited information. In the spirit of making this work more accessible to broader audiences, I've also created a series of one-minute animated videos introducing several of these projects.
How do people infer social and moral meaning from group memberships?
The Moralized Coalitions Model
How do people construct coherent identities amid competing social expectations?
How do people reconcile counternormative identities, beliefs, or behaviors?
In a longitudinal study of Republicans for Harris surrounding the 2024 US Presidential Election, I find that perceptions of loyalty not only shape how mainstream group members (i.e., Republicans for Trump) evaluate deviants, but also how outgroup members (Democrats) and deviants themselves do. This work, published in Behavioral Sciences, demonstrates that counternormative political group members do not always devalue loyalty, but may instead redefine what it means to be truly loyal to one’s group.
How do individuals’ perceptions of the overlap between their ingroups influence the way they think about themselves and others?
A new theory and measure of contrarianism
How do people use the
social context to make social inferences under ambiguity?
My research has also examined how autism shapes social cognition by investigating moral values and social comparison emotions. Across an in-person and a preregistered online study published in Social Cognition, I found that autistic adults reported weaker endorsement of group-binding moral values (e.g., loyalty, authority, and purity) and lower levels of social comparison emotions such as envy and schadenfreude, while showing no reduction in individualizing values like fairness and care. These findings suggest that autism is associated with reduced sensitivity to group-based social information, offering new insights into how differences in social cognition shape moral judgment and intergroup processes.
Individuals belong to many different social groups, and some combinations of groups are rarer than others (e.g., Christian liberals, gay Republicans). This work investigates how social identity complexity, the perceived overlap between one’s multiple social groups influences how they think about themselves and others. In a paper published in JESP, I find that individuals who perceive their political identity to be more distinct from their other social identities judge out-party members less harshly.
How do differences in social cognition shape morality
and social evaluation?
Many psychological theories are centered around the idea that people innately conform to social norms. Yet, society is shaped by those who resist this tendency, thinking and acting in ways that divert from the mainstream. In a recent paper published in PAID, I introduce the Contrarianism Scale, a novel measure of individual differences in nonconformity. I discuss how understanding contrarianism, its manifestations and motivations, can make norm-based behavioral interventions more effective. See examples of modern-day contrarians here.
In a project published in Social Cognition, I examine how people infer others' underlying motives when behavior is inherently ambiguous. Across four studies, I found that observers use social context—including the helper–recipient relationship and the visibility of helping—to distinguish relationship-based motives from selfish and selfless motives, with these inferences shaping judgments of helpers' moral character. This work demonstrates that social relationships provide a powerful framework for interpreting others' intentions when multiple explanations for behavior are plausible.
My research develops the Moralized Coalitions Model (MCM), which proposes that people infer social and moral meaning by representing social groups as members of broader moralized coalitions rather than as isolated categories. As political identities become increasingly aligned with race, religion, and other groups, membership in one group becomes a basis for inferring other group memberships, causing moral evaluations to spill over across perceived coalition members. In my forthcoming JEP:G paper, I provide causal evidence that changing perceived overlap between parties and social groups systematically changes evaluations of those groups, with these effects driven primarily by perceived coalition loyalty rather than ideological or trait similarity.
Watch this video for more information→
How does group membership influence punishment decisions?
How do people use group information to understand individuals?
My earlier work examined how group membership shapes responses to interpersonal transgressions by distinguishing between punishment and partner rejection. Across two incentivized economic game studies published in Scientific Reports, I found that people punished outgroup members more harshly than ingroup members but were no more likely to reject them as future interaction partners, suggesting that punishment is more sensitive to group boundaries because it serves a norm-enforcement and coalition-signaling function, whereas partner rejection is guided primarily by considerations of personal welfare.