Samuel Klein

Despite the obvious sophistication of the mind, we often find ourselves entangled in a web of misjudgments, overgeneralizations, and discriminatory acts. Why does our mental machinery, which works so well so often, also frequently lead us astray in the social world? And why, given our mental prowess, are our thoughts and behaviors swayed by so many features of our environment that may be irrelevant to our goals, like the cues that highlight our broadly shared identities or those that highlight our differences at an interpersonal level?
 

To understand how people think about each other, I measure both the information we use and the processes by which we use it to derive impressions and evaluations of others, and the decisions that follow. I am especially interested in how contexts shape which information we use and how we use it. My work relies on a diverse toolkit of computational models, behavioral paradigms, and data sources.