OVERVIEW

Climate change, financial meltdowns, global pandemics, the opioid crisis — the greatest challenges we face involve incredibly complex physical and social systems. Even when these issues impact our daily lives, they can still seem remote and dicult to grasp. How do people think and reason about such abstract topics? Much of what we know about the world comes not from direct experience, but from what we hear and read. As a result, our work focuses on how language and public discourse reflect and shape attitudes and decision-making. We take a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on behavioral, analytic, and computational methods from cognitive and social psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and communications. Read on for more information about some of our ongoing projects.

METAPHOR in LANGUAGE and THOUGHT
One way to gain insight into how people think about complex subjects is to look at how they talk about them. When people communicate about abstract topics like the economy or the environment, they often do so metaphorically. Our work examines how metaphors reflect and shape how we think about the world. We have found that framing a discussion of a complex topic with metaphor can influence how people reason about everything from the federal budget, to law enforcement, to climate change, and metaphors are effective whether you read them for yourself or listen to someone else. For an overview of our ideas about the role of metaphor in language and thought, check out THIS paper.

LAY THEORIES
Scientists create formal models to make sense of complex systems, but most people use simpler conceptual schemas or lay theories. Our work investigates the factors that shape — and the consequences of holding — particular lay theories. For example, we have looked at the impact of narratives and personal stories on lay theories of obesity, and how labels, political ideology, and metaphors influence lay theories of addiction and depression. We have also explored the structure of lay theories of teaching ​and learning, and the role that economic lay theories play in how people react to reading about the changing demographic landscape in the United States.

LINGUISTIC FRAMING
Language is our primary tool for communicating our thoughts and feelings to others, and for getting them to see the world the way we want them to. Researchers from many disciplines study framing effects, examining how subtle linguistic cues affect attitudes and decision-making. Our studies have shown how and why certain syntactic constructions impact how we think about group differences, and how a 'victim' label can influence how people evaluate criminal assault cases. Recently, we have been developing a general framework that accounts for many linguistic framing effects using basic principles of discourse processing and pragmatic reasoning.

BODY, CULTURE, and MIND
According to an embodied cognition perspective, complex mental abilities are grounded in more basic sensorimotor systems in the brain and emerge from the dynamic interplay between brain, body, and world. This framework has helped us generate and test novel predictions about how people process faces, how physical motor experiences affect how we perceive and imagine everyday objects, and how metaphorical concepts are learned and emerge across cultures.