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]
