RESEARCH
Answers to the above questions have profound implications for groups, relationships, and the people within those groups and relationships. Finding answers to these types of questions is the central aim of the research we conduct in the EPOCH Lab.
At a broad level, our research leverages theory from social psychology and evolutionary biology to examine the motivational aspects of adaptive social cognition and behavior. We examine the downstream behavioral consequences of people’s motives and pinpoint some of the specific cognitions, emotions, and hormonal processes that those motives elicit. Moreover, we conduct experiments to uncover how key contextual factors influence whether a person’s motives give rise to prosocial behavior or antisocial behavior.