In our Affiliate Highlights series, we are sharing short interviews with members of our community, offering a glimpse into their research, interests, and what inspires their work. This year, we are randomly selecting assistant and associate professors from our Affiliates program.
Each feature includes a few brief questions to help spark connections, highlight new opportunities, and maybe even introduce you to your next collaborator. This month, get to know Benedek Kurdi!
Benedek Kurdi | assistant professor, psychology
What are your main research interests?
The goal of our work in the Social Cognition Lab is to uncover how the human mind learns and represents information about other people, both as individuals and as members of social groups. Sometimes we pursue these questions as basic questions of cognitive science, but we are also increasingly interested in whether and how the findings that we obtain in lab-based and online experiments generalize to real-world situations. For this reason, several lines of work in the lab are now using large-scale computational analyses (for example, of online text) to find convergent evidence for lab findings, or to discover entirely new phenomena. For example, in an ongoing line of work, we are trying to figure out if a bias linking Black Americans to being perpetrators and White Americans to being victims of crime has any antecedents in news stories that Americans are exposed to on a daily basis.
What are you most excited about in your research this year?
What I am particularly excited about is how the Social Cognition Lab has grown from just me just two years ago to eight members today, not to speak of the graduate students from other labs and even programs that I have been lucky enough to collaborate and interact with. It is incredibly exciting to be able to mentor and learn from so many committed, passionate, and talented students and early-career colleagues. Each of them brings something truly unique to our community, and my research has branched out in directions that I could never have envisioned a few years ago.