Other people are boundless sources of social information. We try to understand the people around us by making inferences based on their appearances, their behavior, and their preferences. In fact, we make these judgments based upon incredibly thin slices of experience, often with far-reaching downstream consequences for our treatment of other people. However, thin-slices don’t always tell the whole story and initial impressions are often violated. Even basic perceptual evaluations may be subject to top-down influences: the same smile on the face of a friend may convey a much different message on the face of a foe. As such, our understanding of others is continuously revised and recontextualized in light of multiple channels of social information.

My work aims to uncover the social cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie how we dynamically perceive and learn about other people, using techniques from experimental social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, and perceptual psychophysics. My primary research applies this approach to a consequential societal problem: racial disparities in health care. Specifically, this research examines perceptual contributions to racial bias in pain treatment, as part of a broader line of work on top-down influences on social perception. My secondary research program concerns the neural bases of social impression updating. Taken together, my work offers insights into dynamic social perception and cognition and by extension, provides a framework for understanding societal-level phenomena like disparities in health care and intergroup bias. In addition, I’ve also focused my attention on factors influencing the reproducibility of psychological science, including contextual sensitivity and political ideology.