Sara D. Hodges

I study how people form an understanding of other people. I'm interested in the role that the self, context, and other sources of information play in forming that understanding. One of my primary research interests is in people’s attempts to construct someone else’s perspective—what motivates them, how accurate they are, how strategies such as social comparison and projection are used in the process, and what consequences result from taking someone else's perspective. In another line of work, I investigate social comparisons, with a focus on how people use information about themselves in making these comparisons. In my work, I seek to acknowledge both the cleverness and shortcomings of human cognitive strategies.

August 2015