Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

As should be apparent from looking at the selection of my publications below, I am quite eclectic as to research areas and interests. I will briefly describe several of these areas. In one line of work, my colleagues and I have developed a model of preferences, called the feature-matching model. This model involves the factors of shared versus unique features and the direction of comparison in which options are compared. This model has been successful in predicting the option that is chosen, the difficulty in making the decision, and the satisfaction with the chosen option.

In another line of work, I have focused on impressions of individuals and groups. We have demonstrated that the processes of person impression formation and group perceptions involve similar processes, although the former gives more play to on-line impression formation, whereas the latter involves memory-based processes to a greater extent. Perceived entitativity and group types have also played a substantial role in the work on group impressions. Research in the area of counterfactual thinking has identified the functions and affective consequences of counterfactual generation.

Recent work has focused on counterfactual generation as a way to understand the finding that general and abstract objects or events (e.g. "Starving children") are treated very differently from specific items (e.g., "Ann Smith, who is a starving child"). We have also investigated what makes counterfactual thoughts powerful in affecting judgments and feelings. Recent work has investigated language differences and how these differences affect mental representations. For example, some language (e.g., English) use adjective-noun word other. Others (e.g., Italian) use non-adjective word order. This difference sin word order affects probability judgments, similarity judgments, memory, and stereotypes.

I have also worked on the interface of psychology and the law. In one project, we discuss the role of "sticky metaphors" for anger and fear of the legal doctrine of voluntary manslaughter (heat of passion murders and why men who kill adulterous wives out of anger benefit from this doctrine but battered wives who kill out of fear do not.