Research
Broadly, I’m interested in how people interact and connect. My research uses a wide array of quantitative approaches and methods (i.e., social network analysis, naturalistic conversational paradigms, longitudinal surveys) to investigate the interplay between our conversations, our friendships, and the ways we think.
A few of the central questions that guide my research are below:
How do conversations change the way we think about ourselves?
The way we think about ourselves changes with time and experience, but do the people we interact with also shape our self-views? We had participants talk to each other while measuing how they thought about themselves both before and after their conversations. We found that participants tended to think about themselves more similarly after their conversations as compared to before. We call this phenomenon "inter-self alignment." Inter-self alignment was especially strong in enjoyable conversations.
In addition to aligning conversation partners to each other, inter-self alignment helps bring people closer to their community's typical self-view. Perhaps conversation is one of our oldest and most effective tools for keeping ourselves tuned to each other and thus in sync with the social networks that surround us.
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How do we infer what have in common with our conversation partners?
When we talk with someone, we're offered a brief glimpe into how they process the world. How do we build a full impression of that person, and what we might have in common with them, from such a thin slice of expereince? To address this question, we had participants fill out a survey assessing their opinions about a variety of topics (e.g., politics, religion, cultural preferences, etc.) and then matched them via an online chat platform to talk with a stranger about a topic on which they shared the same opinion, a topic on which they had opposing opinions, or a random topic. After their conversation, we had participants tell us which opinions they thought they had in common with their conversation partner.
We found that people who talked about a shared opinion generally felt a greater sense of shared reality, or commonality with their partner. However, even when discussing an opposing opinion, the extent to which they thought they shared other opinions with their partner positively predicted their sense of shared reality. These findings suggest that during conversation, we use inductive reasoning to figure out what else we might share with our conversation partner.
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What do we think about our own conversational abilities?
A large, and growing, body of researh suggests that social connection supports a healthy lifestyle. But conversation, the fundamental way in which we connect with others, can often seem taxing and even intimidating. We dug into these perceptions by investigating how people think about their own conversational skills, as well as their performance in real-life conversations. Overwhelmingly, we find that people are relatively pessimistic about their conversational skills as compared to their other common skills. In addition, people tend to blame themselves for awkward moments in recalled and real-life conversations. These findings shed light on why people are underconfident when approaching informal conversations.
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