Description of Research
How do people form impressions of others?
How do impressions of others influence real-world behavior?
People spontaneously form impressions of unfamiliar others in everyday life, such as inferring how competent, kind, or energetic someone is. Understanding these general characteristics of others is helpful for encoding their chronic behavioral tendencies, which in turn guide our interactions with them. Our lab uses a combination of state-of-the-art computational approaches, cross-cultural designs, and experiments to study how people represent and integrate complex social and non-social cues to form impressions of others in the real world. In many situations, people infer others' general characteristics based on limited information such as physical appearances and a few instances of emotions or behaviors. These inferences generally do not reflect the targets' true characteristics, and instead reflect the perceivers' stereotypes and biases. In a second line of research, our lab applies naturalistic datasets and experiments to study how person perception influences consequential outcomes in the real world, such as voting behavior, courtroom sentencing, misinformation, science communication, and climate actions.
