- Personality and Social Behavior
- Motivated Decision-making and Behavior
- Social Evaluation and Threat Perception
- Legal and Everyday Decision-making
- Coherence in Belief Systems, Belief Change attitude accessibility and the consistency of belief systems
- Impression Formation and person Perception
We are a group of faculty and graduate students studying the application of connectionist (neural network) models to social reasoning and social behavior. We are currently working on the following models:
- A neural network model of personality.
- A neural network model of human motivation and motivated decision-making.
- A connectionist model of social evaluation, based on Cunningham’s Iterative Reprocessing model.
- A connectionist model of threat perception, with David Marsh
- A connectionist model of Cognitive Dissonance.
- Computational models of social behavior in response to threats.
- Computational models of online social behavior (GITHUB, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)
Current Projects
A number of different projects with code and compiled versions can be found at:
https://github.com/SocialComputation
Associated Faculty
Stephen J. Read (Psychology)
Lynn C. Miller (Annenberg School and Psychology)
In addition, a number of individuals in a variety of other departments are also actively investigating computational models (Linguistics, Psychology (Cognitive and Clinical), Computer Science, and the Neural, Informational, and Behavioral Sciences Program (NIBS)).
Students
- Minwoo Ahn
- Peter Wang
- Alice Qiao
- Xiao Liu
- Komal Patri
Hardware
- one 20 core HP computing cluster
- one 12 core HP workstation
Software
Emergent Neural Network simulation software.
Thagard’s ECHO program for parallel constraint satisfaction models