research
interests.
I study how people build shared understanding of each other through interaction and conversation, and how that grounds social connection.
We only ever have direct access to our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet when we meet someone new, we routinely form impressions of them, discover what we have in common, and build genuine relationships — often remarkably quickly. How do we infer, from sparse evidence, what we have in common with someone? What makes some discovered commonalities feel meaningful while others feel inconsequential? And how does real interaction shape the inferences we draw about others' minds?
My dissertation approaches these questions through the lens of how connection forms. I build custom multiplayer web experiments to study three things: how people extrapolate from sparse commonalities to a partner's broader worldview; how conversation builds a shared understanding even when experiences differ; and how perceived rarity and disclosure depth shape which commonalities feel meaningful. These experiments let me causally manipulate what people learn about each other while preserving the dynamics of real interaction, and I analyze the data using natural language processing and computational cognitive modeling.
Looking forward, I am extending this research program to how people construct and update models of other minds during joint action and planning, and what happens when this process breaks down. Social interaction requires ongoing inference about others' intentions, beliefs, and goals, and failures in this process may underlie difficulties in social functioning across a range of psychiatric conditions. By bridging social cognition, computational modeling, and clinical science, I hope to build a mechanistic account of how we come to feel, or fail to feel, truly understood by others.