Research Areas & Interests
(Or, download my Research Statement)
Getting Along & Getting Ahead
The goal of my research is to understand the causes and consequences of social judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. As a social psychologist, I am interested in the question of how people are able to ‘get along’ with others while still finding ways to ‘get ahead’ as individuals. How do we choose between conflicting motives for humility and braggadocio? Prosociality and selfishness? Accepting or ignoring aversive information about ourselves? Understanding social decision-making provides opportunities not only to improve the efficiency and consistency of human behavior, but also to increase individuals’ subjective experiences of happiness, agency, and well-being. To this end, my research extends into three distinct lines borrowing from social and cognitive psychology, economics, and statistics to ask how individuals navigate the social world.
The goal of my research is to understand the causes and consequences of social judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. As a social psychologist, I am interested in the question of how people are able to ‘get along’ with others while still finding ways to ‘get ahead’ as individuals. How do we choose between conflicting motives for humility and braggadocio? Prosociality and selfishness? Accepting or ignoring aversive information about ourselves? Understanding social decision-making provides opportunities not only to improve the efficiency and consistency of human behavior, but also to increase individuals’ subjective experiences of happiness, agency, and well-being. To this end, my research extends into three distinct lines borrowing from social and cognitive psychology, economics, and statistics to ask how individuals navigate the social world.
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1. Overconfidence and Self-Enhancement
Not everyone who claims to be better than average can be. However, many who claim to be better than others are telling the truth. Is there a psychological distinction to be made between those who accurately see themselves in a favorable light and those who do so erroneously? How do we separate confidence from overconfidence? I began to map this distinction by developing a measurement tool to diagnose accurate and inaccurate self-enhancement (Heck & Krueger, 2015; Krueger & Heck, invited revision). In a simple performance domain, most people who claim to be better than average are accurate in their confident, self-enhancing claims. Similarly, more educated people are more likely to (accurately) claim above-average intelligence (Heck, Simons, and Chabris, 2018). I also found that bragging about being above average is seen by others as rational and competent, yet is condemned by those same observers as hubristic and immoral (Heck & Krueger, 2016). This ‘humility paradox’ in self-perception raises an important psychological question: is it better to express confidence or remain humble in an uncertain social situation? |
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2. The Volunteer's Dilemma
How do individuals reason when choosing whether to help others at cost to themselves? What are the reputational consequences of behaving prosocially or selfishly? Coordinating to solve this task is difficult: too much volunteering is an inefficient use of resources and can occasionally reduce group gain (e.g., by tying up the phone lines). My work in this area shows that individuals reason egocentrically to solve this dilemma: players tend to pay attention to their own outcomes while ignoring outcomes for others (Krueger, Heck, & Wagner, 2018). Additionally, observers view the decision to volunteer as both moral and rational, while disparaging defection (Heck & Krueger, 2017). In the future, I am interested in asking what cognitive processes underlie the decision to volunteer in uncertain environments, and how these decisions are punished or rewarded by others in more realistic contexts. I am also interested in using process-tracing methods (e.g., mouse and eye tracking) to determine when decision-makers attend to outcomes other than their own. |
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3. Deliberate Ignorance
As a postdoctoral fellow at Geisinger Health System, I am developing a new line of research concerned with when and why people choose to ignore useful but aversive information. Here, I draw from health psychology and bioethics to study the psychological, economic, and health consequences of choosing to ignore self-relevant genetic information. For example, who chooses to learn whether they are likely to develop breast cancer (a genetic predisposition that can be treated when detected early), or Alzheimer’s disease (a predisposition that cannot be treated)? I am similarly interested in the reputational consequences of choosing ignorance over acceptance. Here, preliminary data suggest that observers view the decision to ignore predictive information about one’s own genes as both irrational and immoral, suggesting that there may be normative social pressures to learn health-relevant information about oneself (Heck & Meyer, in press). |
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Heuristic Statistical Inference
A secondary interest has led to me ask how useful traditional statistical tools are for drawing effective and accurate inferences. In other words, how well does the p-value produced by Null Hypothesis Significance Testing predict the probability of a hypothesis? Drawing from various schools of statistical thought (Fisherian, Neyman-Pearsonian, and Bayesian), my work in this area demonstrates that the p-value can serve as a useful heuristic tool in realistic contexts (Krueger & Heck, 2017; 2018; 2019). I am interested in pursuing questions of when statistical inferences may be misleading or problematic, and how scientists, students, journalists, and the public interpret these inferences. |