SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE LAB
Exploring Motivated Cognition in Mind, Brain, & Behavior
Lab Director: Brent Hughes, Ph.D.
WHAT DO WE INVESTIGATE?
People like to believe their thinking reflects an accurate impression of reality. Upon closer inspection, this assumption collapses. Instead, like the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, people tend to see themselves and their peers as unrealistically likable, moral, attractive, trustworthy, and all other positive traits. These cases exemplify the phenomenon of motivated cognition, under which goals and needs guide individuals’ thinking toward desired conclusions. We study the processes underlying motivated cognition, their influence on self-perception, social cognition, and decision-making, and their impact on real-world outcomes.
Self-Representation: Mechanisms, Motivations, and Malleability
Self-Disclosure, Social Connection, and Social Support
Group-Motivated Information Processing
Race Biases in Perception, Learning, and Decision Making
HOW DO WE INVESTIGATE?
Functional Neuroimaging
Behavioral Experiments
Computational Modeling
Experience Sampling
OUR LAB MEMBERS
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Elder, J.J., Davis, T.H., & Hughes, B.L. (in press). A fluid self-concept: How the brain maintains coherence and positivity across an interconnected self-concept while incorporating social feedback. Journal of Neuroscience. [link]
Derreumaux, Y., Hughes, B., Lindskog, M., & Bergh, R. (in press). Group-Motivated Sampling: From Skewed Experiences to Biased Evaluations. To appear in K. Fiedler, P. Juslin & J. Denrell (Eds), Sampling in judgment and decision making. Cambridge University Press. [link]
Elder, J.J., Cheung, B., Davis, T.H., & Hughes, B.L. (2023). Mapping the Self: A network approach for understanding psychological and neural representations of self-concept structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [link]
Derreumaux, Y., Elder, J.J., Ben-Zeev, A., Suri, G., Quimby, T., & Hughes, B.L. (2023). Stereotypes disrupt probabilistic category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [link]
Derreumaux, Y., Shamsian, K., & Hughes, B.L. (2023). Computational underpinnings of partisan information processing biases and associations with depth of cognitive reasoning. Cognition. [link]
