Interests

This research program revolves around understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of laypeople’s beliefs at different levels - beliefs about scientists, about sciences, and about scientific information - and how these interact with science-unrelated beliefs (e.g., political) and motivations, with the goal of creating a mechanistic and comprehensive understanging of the bases for trust in science. In parallel, this research line includes work applying these general principles to the case of psychological science, tapping into beliefs about the nature of psychological phenomena and their malleability, focused on decreasing the reigning skepticism towards psychology.

In this research program, I seek to unravel the cognitive and motivational underpinning of self and social representations; concretely, how people think about social groups and about themselves in these groups. Work includes how people internally represent heterogeneity in present and past social groups, how motivational factors promote a bias blind spot (i.e., perceiving oneself as systematically less biased than others), among others.

In this research program, I explore the underlying mechanisms - such as holistic processing of visual stimuli - that enable fast and accurate identification of frequently-exposed-to objects, namely words and faces. Moreover, I also explore the how’s and why’s behind the cross-race effect - the tendency for people to more accurately recall faces belonging to their ethnicity (vs. faces from other ethnicities).