I study how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds, from the person sitting across the table to the whole country buzzing around them. I also write a blog called Experimental History.

One stream of my work focuses on the misperceptions that arise when people talk face-to-face. For instance, every conversation has to end sometime––do people know when it should? Not really, it seems. Most conversations end when nobody wants them to, both because people want to talk for different amounts of time, and because they have no idea when the other person wants to go. That work has been covered by media outlets including Science, Nature, and Jimmy Kimmel.

Recently, I’ve been interested in people’s theories and misperception of change in the world around them. People think that morality has declined––could they be right, and if not, why do they think that? People think they’re pretty different from their grandparents––do they attribute that difference to being different ages or members of different generations? When people pick sides on an issue, they care not only what other people think, but how those opinions are changing––so do they know how opinions have actually changed?