SPADE Lab

The Social Psychology and Daily Experience (SPADE) Lab works on research that applies the principles and methods of social cognition to questions with direct real-world relevance. We have three broad areas of interest with this overarching theme.

First, we study social perception, with a focus on the perception of groups. We examine both basic questions (e.g., the antecedents of categorization and social essentialism) and applied issues (e.g., the implications of social identity for prejudice reduction interventions and political bipartisanship).

Second, we study judgment and decision making in a variety of applied contexts. For example, we’ve examined threat perception and fake news detection in COVID-19, crowdsourced judgments in predicting future events, and hindsight bias in poker and politics.

Third, we study emerging technology – both as a tool to study cognition and behavior (e.g., with smartphones and other recording devices) and as a topic in its own right (e.g., questions of morality, agency, and trust in a changing technological landscape).