Welcome! Thank you for your interest in the Social Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon, directed by Dr. Sara Hodges. We are interested in many aspects of interpersonal perception and social behavior. In particular we study empathy, perspective taking, interpersonal sensitivity and decision making.

Research

Perspective taking and empathy

What does it mean to take another person’s perspective? We are interested in both cognitive outcomes of perspective taking as well as affective ones (for example, how perspective taking affects relationships). Most recently, we have been looking at how similarity of experience and motivation affect empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately infer another person’s thoughts). We have found that when people try to infer someone else’s thoughts, they integrate information from a variety of sources, including outside information (e.g., schemas and stereotypes). One interesting twist on this work has been to explore how fiction writers take their characters’ perspectives, which can be viewed as a special case of perspective taking, in which the perspective must be totally constructed, rather than simply “taken.”

Self-other overlap

When people are close to each other, or if they find themselves taking each other’s perspective, they start to feel “overlap” with each other – their fates feel more entwined, their representations of the self and the other merge, and thinking about one brings to mind the other. Although self-other overlap is often found in successful relationships, we have also found it interesting to explore in less prototypical relationships, including those with deities or abusive partners. Furthermore, a number of ways have been proposed to measure self-other overlap – but are they all measuring the same thing?