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., Cheung, B., Davis, T.H., & Hughes, B.L. (2022). Mapping the Self: A network approach for understanding psychological and neural representations of self-concept structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [link

Elder, J.J., Davis, T.H., & Hughes, B.L. (2022). Learning About the Self: Motives for coherence and positivity constrain learning from self-relevant feedback. Psychological Science. [link]

Derreumaux, Y., Bergh, R., & Hughes, B.L. (2022). Partisan-motivated sampling: Re-examining politically motivated reasoning across the information processing stream. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [link]

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