How do people learn to navigate the social world?

The social world is rife with uncertainty. We do not have access to the inner workings of others’ minds, so we must constantly assess how to behave towards another person given very limited information (e.g., does this person seem trustworthy?).

This problem becomes even harder when we consider the fact that all of our social lives operate against the backdrop of large, evolving, and complicated social networks, where our actions can reverberate far beyond a single interaction with a friend.

We tackle how the mind and brain represent information about other people, how that information is leveraged to trust or to cooperate with the right people, and how these processes can go awry, leading to suboptimal behaviors. We measure at the level of individual interactions and the most complex social environments, our social networks, testing whether the human mind can represent vast relational information, and how this information is organized in the mind and the brain. Finally, we ask what these mental representations afford, from climbing the social ladder to positions of influence to accurately predicting who will become friends in the future.

How do emotions bias social learning and behavior?

At the heart of every social thought, choice, or interaction is an emotion. A long tradition of affective science argues that emotion contributes to both the representation and computation of value.

The lab extends these ideas by leveraging various tools, from machine learning to neuroimaging, to better understand how emotion and affect drive the way we represent and interact with others in our social world. Most recently, we have argued that affective prediction errors, which are neurally differentiated from reward prediction errors, play a critical role in shaping social behavior, helping us to learn more efficiently. We also consider how theory and methods from other fields, such as physics and dynamical systems, can help us better understand the nature of emotion and how it changes over time. Our hope is to more deeply and parsimoniously explain why some emotions dissipate quickly while others prove to be far stickier, and why misaligned emotion representations can have negative consequences for both mental health and social behavior.

What are the dynamics of human connection?

We are embedded within complex social environments, where our beliefs, emotions, and actions are shaped by those around us and by our (often inaccurate) perceptions of others. Our actions, in turn, impact those we interact with. This bidirectional relationship continually updates our models of ourselves and the world, giving rise to emergent phenomena such as political polarization, extremism, and loneliness.

Studying real-world, in-person networks as they evolve, we investigate how we track the flow of gossip through our communities, how we can feel lonely despite being connected to many others, and how political beliefs get amplified and distorted, clustering into ideological hotspots within the network. Extending this work to online social networks, we examine how social media shapes social connection and, in some cases, disrupts even our most basic learning mechanisms.