Most of my current research examines social category membership and judgment and decision making. More specifically, I study the ways in which judgments and decisions are influenced by the race or ethnicity of people about whom the judgments or decisions are made, or who are present when the judgments or decisions are made. For example, an abundance of recent work has demonstrated that objects that are not weapons are more likely to be erroneously identified as weapons when they appear in close physical proximity, or temporal succession, to images of Black males. It appears to be the case that exposure to Black males—perhaps because of stereotypes associating them with danger—activates concepts related to threat which may in turn bias perceptions of ambiguous objects. Insofar as such processes influence “real world” decisions, such as law enforcement officers’ “shoot/don’t shoot” decisions, tragic errors can result. The case of Amadou Diallo (an unarmed Black shot by New York City police officers) is an incident that is consistent with such an account. My recent work has focused on factors that determine when racial biases of the types documented in the past studies are most likely to occur.

In addition to this work, I am also developing a new line of work focused on principled reasoning. The central question motivating that work is the question of when individuals derive their judgments, such as moral or legal judgments, from the application of principles that are both general and independent of the social category membership of the parties affected by the judgment.


Defining Wisdom Project Update

This research work addresses one question: under what conditions are people’s judgments and decisions organized around the same principles that they consciously endorse? To the extent that existing models of wisdom suggest generally applicable principles of wisdom, this work may help indicate the conditions under which individuals can consciously apply those principles. Preliminary conclusions suggest that it is often difficult to resolve the discrepancies between principles that individuals consciously endorse and the principles they actually apply. Future research will strive to better understand how context can promote principled reasoning, as well as the conditions under which such principled reasoning is adaptive.