• Susan Fiske, Ph.D.
  • Emily Pronin, Ph.D.
  • John T Cacioppo, Ph.D.
  • Rebecca Goldstein, Ph.D.
  • Hymie Anisman, Ph.D.
  • Geoffrey Cohen, Ph.D.
  • David Amodio, Ph.D. 

Group influence and 
situational context
Social Neuroscience
Social Psychology
Social Cognition
Note: Bio excerpts are excerpted from the various researchers' web pages
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Susan Fiske      
Professor of Psychology 
Psychology Department
Princeton University
LABORATORY WEBSITE
PERSONAL WEBSITE
Professor Fiske's research addresses how stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are encouraged or discouraged by social relationships, such as cooperation, competition, and power. We begin with the premise that people easily categorize other people, especially based on race, gender, and age. Going beyond such categories, to learn about the individual person, requires motivation. Social relationships supply one form of motivation to individuate, and our work shows that being on the same team or depending on another person makes people go beyond stereotypes. Conversely, people in power are less motivated to go beyond their stereotypes. In laboratory studies, we examine how a variety of relationships affect people forming impressions of others. Society's cultural stereotypes and prejudice also depend on relationships of power and interdependence. Group status and competition affect how groups are (dis)liked and (dis)respected. In surveys, we examine the content of group stereotypes based on race, gender, age, (dis)ability, income, and more, finding patterns in the ways that society views various groups. In social neuroscience studies, we show how distinct prejudices activate distinct neural networks.
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Emily Pronin, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
Psychology Department
Princeton University 
Much of my research concerns natural asymmetries in the way we perceive ourselves versus the way we perceive others. It further concerns how the processes involved in self and social perception can lead us to misperceive and misunderstand ourselves, and others. Examples of misunderstanding that I investigate include the tendency to perceive insight in one's own judgments -- but bias and other forms of irrationality in others' judgments, and also the tendency to dramatically overestimate the influence of one's own internal thoughts on external events and outcomes. My work not only examines the nature of such misunderstandings (e.g., when and why they occur), but it also concerns how they can impact important phenomena ranging from mental health to intergroup conflict. Another area of research involves how we adjust our identities in response to threatening stereotypes. Studies investigate how women in mathematics "bifurcate" their feminine identities in the face of negative stereotypes about their math ability and potential.
Our lab studies these brain regions for Theory of Mind, as a case study in the deeper and broader question: how does the brain - an electrical and biological machine - construct abstract thoughts?

Theory of Mind is an especially exciting case study because:
Thinking about other minds is the foundation for both personal relationships and societal institutions, and the human capacities to read and write fiction, to teach skills and pass knowledge down generations, and to make moral judgments, especially to forgive accidents. Deficits of social cognition, like Autism, can be more devastating to individuals and their families than the loss of a limb or a sense.

Theory of Mind is a perfect example of the essentially inductive nature of human thought. We don't just build up catalogues of perceptions. We go way beyond the "data" of experience, to infer complex, abstract, invisible causal mechanisms at work in the world.

The brain regions involved in Theory of Mind are incredibly robust. We can find the same regions, in 90% of individual subjects, after just 20 minutes of scan time. Similarly reliable patterns of activation are routinely observed for perceptual mechanisms, like primary sensory and motor cortices, but rarely for dimensions of cognition as abstract and complex as Theory of Mind. The 'Theory of Mind' regions thus offer a rare window through the brain to the mind.

Our work uses . . . functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in adults and children, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), neuropsychological patient studies, and eye-tracking and behavioural methods with adults and infants. And while we mostly study social cognition, a few projects in the lab focus on other key examples of a neurally-localised uniquely human cognitive capacities: executive function, and language.
I am an associate professor in the Social Psychology Program at the University of Kansas. I got my Ph.D. in social psychology at Stanford University for a dissertation (on the topic of enemyship) based on field research in West Africa. In my current work, I apply a variety of methods (both qualitative and quantitative) to investigate the sociocultural-historical foundations of mind. More specifically, much of my research considers the following topics. 

1. Sociocultural foundations of mind and relationship: 
This research program uses comparative field research in West African settings to illuminate the typically invisible, socially constructed affordances that underlie patterns of mind and relationship observed in mainstream psychological science. 

2. A cultural psychology approach to racist oppression: 
Rather than prejudice and stereotypes, this research program considers "intentional worlds" of racism: everyday constructions of reality (e.g., textbook representations of U.S. history) that (a) reflect particular beliefs and desires and (b) systematically promote "desired" outcomes. Regardless of individual intention or awareness, these constructions of reality can be sufficient to reproduce racial inequality
Liane Young, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Morality Lab
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2008
Scholarly Interests: 
  • Moral Psychology and Neuroscience. 
  • The role of theory of mind in moral judgment. Moral emotions. 
  • Cultural and individual differences in moral cognition. 
  • Moral judgment versus moral behavior. 
  • Motivated moral reasoning. 
  • Conceptions of the self and free will. 
The research employs methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), studying patient populations with selective cognitive deficits, and modulating activity in specific brain regions using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
John Jost
Professor of Social Psychology
Visit the Jost Lab
Most of my work focuses on theoretical and empirical implications of a system justification theory, which was first proposed by Jost and  Banaji (1994) and updated by Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004). There are two major goals of system justification theory, and much of my experimental and survey research has addressed one or both of these goals. The first goal is to understand how and why people provide cognitive and ideological support for the status quo, even when their support appears to conflict with personal and group interests. The second is to analyze the social and psychological antecedents and consequences of supporting the status quo, especially for members of disadvantaged groups.

System justification theory addresses the holding of attitudes that are often contrary to one's own self-interest and therefore contrary to what one would expect on the basis of theories of self-enhancement or rational self-interest. Thus, our research focuses on counter-intuitive outcomes, such as the internalization of unfavorable stereotypes about one's own group, nonconscious biases that perpetuate inequality, attitudinal ambivalence directed at fellow ingroup members who challenge the system, opposition to equality among members of disadvantaged groups, rationalization of anticipated social and political outcomes, and tendencies among members of powerless groups to subjectively enhance the legitimacy of their powerlessness and, in some cases, to show greater support for the system than do members of powerful groups.

Current research interests include the study of complementary stereotypes in which members of high and low status groups are seen as possessing distinct sets of advantages and disadvantages. Gender stereotypes, which stress that women are communal but not agentic, whereas men are agentic but not communal, represent one important example of complementary stereotypes that may serve to preserve support for the status quo. Other examples that we have explored include "poor but happy," "rich but miserable," "poor but honest," and "rich but dishonest" stereotypes.

Finally, I am interested in the underlying cognitive and motivational differences between liberals and conservatives. In other words, my collaborators and I are exploring the psychological basis of political ideology. In particular, we are carrying out studies to determine whether certain epistemic existential and relational variables (such as uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and death anxiety, conformity, and so on) are associated more with conservative or right-wing political orientations than with other political orientations. One focus is on whether certain situational factors (such as those pertaining to stability and threat) are capable of bringing about change in the endorsement of political attitudes.
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David Amodio, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science 

NYU Social Neuroscience Lab
My research examines the roles of social cognition and emotion in the regulation of behavior, and the neural mechanisms underlying these processes. Much of my work examines these processes in the context of prejudice and stereotyping, although my interests extend to the areas of motivation and health psychology. In each area, issues of behavioral regulation are central and the focus is on mechanism.

Although the questions that guide my work address classic social psychological issues, my approach is interdisciplinary; I integrate theory and methodology from social psychology, cognitive/ affective neuroscience, and psychophysiology to inform my hypotheses and the designs of my studies. This integrative approach is useful because it often leads to novel hypotheses and it promotes the synthesis of research findings across disciplines. My research may be described broadly as social neuroscience; I typically use EEG, event-related potentials (ERPs), and fMRI in combination with behavioral and self-report measures to study social processes.
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Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
UCLA Department of Psychology - Social Psychology
Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab
Dr. Lieberman has been pursuing social and personality psychology issues using the methods of cognitive neuroscience (fMRI, neuropsychology). His past research has included work on emotion regulation, extraversion, neuroticism, stereotyping, and person perception. His work has led to two new avenues of research that intersect with health and medicine. First, he is working with Naomi Eisenberger, Dr. Emeran Mayer, Dr. Steve Berman, and Dr. Bruce Naliboff to examine the neural basis for social support mitigating the experience of pain. He is also working with Johanna Jarcho and Dr. Andrew Leuchter to examine the neural correlates of the conscious and nonconscious aspects of placebo effects.
"In graduate school, Kevin Ochsner and I coined the term Social Cognitive Neuroscience which has become a thriving area of research over the past decade and describes nearly all of the work done in my lab.  My appointments are in the Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.  My lab uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural bases of social cognition and social experience.  In particular, we examine the neural bases of emotion regulation, persuasion, social rejection, self-knowledge, theory of mind, and fairness."     
Jay is interested in how social identities, values and motivations shape perception and evaluation. His primary line of research takes a multi-level approach to self-categorization and social identity, blending theory and methods from social cognition and cognitive neuroscience to show how the value and contents of our social identities shape virtually all aspects of cognition. Other lines of research explore the processes and implications of moral (versus non-moral) judgment, the structure, antecedents and consequences of hate (versus dislike).
Hymie Anisman, Ph.D.
Institute of Neurosciences
Carleton University 
Centre for Research on Stress, Coping & Well- being 
Stress and pathology
Dr. Anisman’s work has attempted to (a) identify the immune system changes that accompany stressful events, (b) delineate the endocrine and central neurochemical changes exerted by stressors, and (c) determine the conditions under which these effects are optimal. These variations of immune, endocrine and neurochemicals are related to specific behavioral or physical changes that may be associated with pathology.

Brain-Immune interactions 
Multidirectional communication occurs between the immune, endocrine, autonomic and central nervous systems. Dr.Anisman has been attempting to identify the mechanisms (e.g., cytokines) by which such communication occurs. In addition, this work has also attempted to identify some of the physical and psychological sequelae of the immune systems effects on endocrine and neurotransmitter activity.

Depression, Stress and Immune activation
This work has focused on the contribution of stressful life events to the induction of depression, and has identified variables that predict whether drug treatments will be effective in the treatment of the disorder. Dr. Anisman and his colleagues also assess the immune changes associated with depression, and determine whether these are altered with successful treatment of the depressive disorder.
Two basic ideas motivate my research. The first idea is that social psychological theory offers potentially useful tools for changing society in constructive ways. The second idea is that studying attempts to change society is one of the most fruitful ways to develop and assess social psychological theory. Much of my work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions.

Through field experiments in Central and Horn of Africa and in the United States, I have examined the impact of the mass media and interpersonal communication on tolerant and cooperative behaviors. I find support for a behavioral change model based on social norms and group influence. To change behavior, I suggest, it may be more fruitful to target citizens’ perceptions of typical or desirable behaviors (i.e. social norms) than their knowledge or beliefs. How do social norms and behaviors shift in real world settings? Some initial suggestions from this research include peer or role model endorsement, narrative communication, and group discussion. My work in post-conflict countries has led to related research on political cultural change and on civic education. I am also interested in social scientific methodology—particularly causal inference and behavioral measurement.