Research
Applying to graduate school?
This page is designed to help those considering applying to work with me and join the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience (SCN) Lab for graduate school. This page will focus on our current and future research plans rather than what we have done in the past. I know for many of you, figuring out graduate school is really daunting. Back in the Stone Age, when I applied, I really had no idea what I was doing, what I should study, and who I should try to work with. This is one of the bigger decisions you will ever make, so it’s pretty natural for that to be scary.
I don’t have a single philosophy for mentoring students. Each person I have worked with over the past 25 years has needed and wanted different things from me and the lab. My job, just like in raising my own son, is to help make sure when you leave my lab you are ready to take the next steps into a postdoc, a faculty position, or an industry job.
I think what we do works and works pretty consistently. Across social neuroscience and social psychology, there are few labs that have trained more people who have gone on to faculty positions in academia (see my neurotree page or look at the list of Lab Alumni). My trainees have gone on to faculty positions at Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, New York University, Ohio State University, University of North Carolina, University of Oregon, UC Irvine, and UCLA among others.
The UCLA SCN was the first lab in the United States to primarily focus on fMRI-based social neuroscience using fMRI to study social psychological questions. Kevin Ochsner and I helped launch this area of research with our earlier papers in what we called ‘social cognitive neuroscience’ (Lieberman, 2000; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001; Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001). Back then, we had no idea there would be a thriving field 20+ years later. We just hoped doing this newfangled research might get us jobs (and answer some interesting questions).
I have studied many things over the years: mentalizing, the default mode network, social working memory, affect labeling, persuasion, empathy, self-knowledge, fairness, and social rejection (see Publications Listed by Topic). I typically try to take on a new program of research with each new graduate student so we can explore that new area together. For the first time in 25 years, there is a central core to all of the research in my lab: the CEEing Model (Lieberman, 2022) which characterizes our pre-reflective experience.
While I have been using fMRI in my research since 1998, these days, my lab primarily relies on another neuroimaging technique called functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). This technology, shown in the picture below, is mobile and portable meaning we can take it anywhere in the world (we have set up pop-up neuroscience labs in the Middle East to run studies there) and can study up to 4 people sitting and talking face-to-face, something you cannot do with fMRI scanning. Using fNIRS has allowed us to make our social neuroscience research much more social.
SAN Graduate Major at UCLA
UCLA is the only Ph.D. program in the world where you can actually major in Social & Affective Neuroscience (SAN) during graduate school. Here, all of your training will be specifically geared towards teaching you how to see, think, and do research like a social and affective neuroscientist. There are many members of the Psychology Department who contribute to this mission. Naomi Eisenberger, Carolyn Parkinson, Jaime Castrellon, and myself are the core member of the SAN group in our department. In addition, Jennifer Silvers, Adriana Galvan, Katie Karlsgodt, Lara Ray, Lucina Uddin, and Ian Krajbich all contribute to the SAN mission of the department.
The CEEing Model
Isn’t it odd that we use the same word ‘see’ in the sentences ‘I see the mountain’ and ‘I see what you mean’? This isn’t a quirk of English - the same is true in dozens of languages around the world. We use the word ‘see’ anytime we are talking about effortless meaning making, whether it’s seeing something visual (e.g. a mountain), seeing something semantic (e.g. what someone means), or seeing something psychological (e.g. seeing a person’s emotional state or true character). These are all forms of pre-reflective experiences, meaning they are experiences that we haven’t stopped to think about (i.e. reflected on).
CEEing (Lieberman, 2022) is an umbrella term for all the different kinds of seeing and experiencing we engage in and it is an acronym for Coherent Effortless Experiences that have the same INtuitive Giveness of visual experience. CEEing largely takes place in an area I call Gestalt cortex (see image above). When you effortlessly bring coherence to something in the world, whether it’s visual, semantic, psychological, or emotional, it centrally involves this region. The video above is a recent talk I gave that goes into this in much more detail if you are interested. The things discussed in this talk and the related content below give a good picture of what I am interested in studying going forward. Most of the other topics I have studied historically (affect labeling, social rejection, etc) are not topics I plan to study in the future. In other words, if you apply to work with me primarily to study affect labeling, it is unlikely you will be admitted because I am not planning to study that going forward.
Neural Synchrony & Consciousness
Neural synchrony (also known as intersubject correlation) looks at two or more people’s brains and looks at the responses over time in the same region of those brains while those people have a shared experience (e.g. watching a video clip or talking to each other). The image below shows this. The more correlated (i.e. similar) the fluctuations over time are in those two brains, the more neural synchrony they have. What does high neural synchrony mean? Well, if you look in primary auditory cortex, the first place sound is processed in the brain, it would probably mean the same sounds are hitting the eardrums of two people. If you look in primary visual cortex, it probably means the same things are hitting the retinas of two people. But if you look in Gestalt cortex, it actually means two people are probably subjectively experiencing something in similar ways. If you listen to a story with multiple interpretations, primary auditory cortex will show neural synchrony across all listeners, but Gestalt cortex will only show neural synchrony among those who had the same interpretation of the story (Yeshurun et al., 2017).
The connection between neural synchrony and similar ways of experiencing something is relevant to all the things we are studying in the SCN lab these days. But it speaks to the study of consciousness directly and this is something I am interested in pursuing further. Consciousness research is in a golden age after decades of it being taboo to study consciousness directly. When neuroscientists study consciousness they almost invariably ask one of two questions: (1) How is the brain different when a person is conscious, awake, and alert compared to when a person is unconscious? And (2) What regions of the brain are involved in consciously detecting a stimulus compared to when it is not consciously experienced? I often refer to this second one as ‘detection consciousness’ and it’s focused on what you are conscious of. There is a third question that has largely been ignored but is of equal interest which is (3) What in the brain supports people having different subjective experiences of the same objective inputs? Many years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked us to consider ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ He was making the argument that all conscious creatures have something that ‘it is like’ to be that conscious creature, but other objects in the world don’t have this. He also argued that a 3rd person materialistic science could never account for this ‘what it is like-ness’ of conscious experiences. In humans, each of our experiences have a ‘what it is like-ness’ and they are not always the same from one person to the next. People who love or hate Donald Trump have different ‘what it is like’ experiences when they see a picture of Donald Trump, with some seeing a criminal and a threat to democracy and others seeing a hero who is being persecuted for trying to save democracy.
This is the question of subjectivity and the fact that each of us has experiences that differ from each other’s even when we are watching the same exact video clip. How the brain does this should be a central question in the neuroscience of consciousness. Neural synchrony gives us both a method and an answer. With neural synchrony, we can allow a person to watch an extended video during brain scans and not have to interrupt a person or ask them to indicate with button presses what they have noticed. Moreover, we know that Gestalt cortex, probably along with some other regions of the default mode network are central to our distinctive subjective experiences - integrating various idiosyncratic non sensory inputs (memories, expectations, goals) with the current inputs from the world. If your Gestalt cortex shows neural synchrony with mine while we watch a Donald Trump speech, then the ‘what it is like’ of our experiences are probably pretty similar.
Psychological Lenses
Each of us have a variety of psychological lenses we use to construct our experience of the world. These are like head-up displays (HUDs) that one might have in a car, that add an augmented reality layer to what we experience in an easily digestible format. One person might see through a lens of power, effortlessly noticing power dynamics all around them, while another person might see through an empathy lens, effortlessly noticing who is in need of help and care. Because we see through our lenses rather than seeing the lenses themselves, we mistake the contributions of the lenses for reality. I am interested in how a person’s lenses can be measured and how this then predicts various social outcomes between people. When two people show high neural synchrony it suggests they have overlap in their lenses but does not tell us what those lenses are. We apply a neural reference groups (Dieffenbach…Lieberman, 2021) approach which can identify a single lens at a time using neuroimaging combined with machine learning. With it, we have identified participants political lenses, whether CEOs are currently seeing through a lens of burnout (Goldstein & Lieberman, in prep), and whether an intervention has temporarily shifted a person’s lenses (Binnquist, Dieffenbach, & Lieberman, in prep). I also have founded a company, Resonance, that uses self-reported lenses to identify compatibility between people.
A more computational approach, which I am interested in pursuing, might involve using various existing written material to identify which concepts tend to reliably go together for a person. For instance, we could look at all of the tweets in a person’s twitter account or all the speeches made by politicians on the floor of the Senate. Using these written materials, we could develop constraint satisfaction models or deep neural networks which would assess the interpretative states a person or group is biased towards ending up in. The bias to end up in particular interpretative states is another way of characterizing lenses. I am also interested in the extent to which, like visual lenses, each person thinks their lenses and the lenses that other people help focus their perception of reality as opposed to distorting their perception of reality. Finally, I am interested in the extent to which these lenses are malleable. Can we turn off and on different lenses at any moment intentionally? Can we change our mental habits over time to emphasize and cultivate some lenses and deemphasize others? [NOTE: Working this project requires significant computational/coding skills]
Polarization & Open-mindedness
If you are living in the United States and not living under a rock, you are probably aware that we are in one of the most politically polarized times in our nation’s history. We have a deep distrust and dislike of those on the other side of the political aisle and for the most part are unwilling to even engage in civil discussion with them. We have spent the last 50 years geographically segregating ourselves such that we are far less likely to live next door to someone with political views that differ from our own than we used to be. This means that we tend to be surrounded by people who share the same invisible psychological lenses that we have. Thus, not only are we each biased by our own lenses that we cannot see, but those around us tend to have the same biases and thus do not serve as a corrective encouraging us to have greater intellectual humility about the objectiveness of our own experience.
In our lab, we have taken three approaches to this phenomenon. First, we have used the neural reference group approach with fNIRS to identify the political lenses of different groups of people (Dieffenbach…Lieberman, 2021). We can do this without having to ask people about their views because we can look at the extent to which each person shows neural synchrony with those for whom their political lenses are well-known. If you are liberal, you will show more neural synchrony with other liberals than conservatives (and visa versa).
Second, we examine people having cross-ideological conversations (i.e. conversations with those who have opposing ideological views) or people who disagree in other ways. We have run studies of people negotiating to find a shared solution to a problem when they start with different ideas of the best solution and we see that neural synchrony tends to be quite low until late in the conversation when they begin to see eye-to-eye. We have brought in romantic couples and had them talk about a topic that causes them conflict. When they do, we see neural synchrony in Gestalt cortex drop compared to when they discuss other topics.
More recently, we have had people who strongly disagree on ideological issues like gun control or transgender rights talk to each other. For instance, in one study we have liberals and conservatives talk over Zoom about topics they disagreed on. Participants found the conversations far more enjoyable and productive than they had anticipated in advance (Binnquist, Dolbier, Dieffenbach, & Lieberman, 2022). This suggests that people may avoid having cross-ideological conversations based on predictions of what that experience will be like, but that under the right conditions they can be far better than people anticipate. We have also completed an fNIRS study of people talking to each other over Zoom. In this study, liberals in Los Angeles talked to conservatives in Texas while their brains were scanned using fNIRS. This is the first study ever of the neuroscience of face-to-face cross-ideological conversations.
Finally, we are really interested in the interventions that can help partisans appreciate how others may reasonably see things differently and to have more respect for those individuals. We do not expect conversations to dramatically change the political views of individuals, but we think an important goal is to increase open-mindedness, our willingness to talk and connect with people who see the world differently than we do. We have recently written a major review of all the different ways to induce open-mindedness (Dolbier, Dieffenbach, & Lieberman, 2023). We have tested multiple open-mindedness interventions head-to-head to see which is the most successful within a single study design (Dolbier & Lieberman, in prep). We have shown that at a neural level, these interventions can not only shift people’s self-reported attitudes, but how a person actually sees and experiences cross-ideological content (Binnquist, Dieffenbach, & Lieberman, in prep). Finally, we have looked at how interventions can alter the neural synchrony patterns in face-to-face cross-ideological conversations (Binnquist & Lieberman, in prep).
In a related line of work, Leezet Matos is examining how people of different races ‘see’ racial interactions similarly or differently. The first steps in this work have used computational linguistics to highlight when Black and white participants see and describe racial interactions in different ways. This is now being followed up with an fMRI study to examine race-based differences in neural synchrony while watching these interactions. The third phase of this research will involve looking at different interventions like perspective-taking and perspective-getting as possible ways to align seeing across races.
The Neuroscience of Teams
We live much of our lives in teams. Whether it’s sports, work, or even raising a child, much of what we do is in small groups that have shared goals of accomplishing a set of outcomes. Until recently, it has been nearly impossible to study the brains of team members as they are actually doing teamwork together. fNIRS allows us to look at the minds of teammates while they are interacting, without having to interrupt them to ask how things are going.
In our first major study of the neuroscience of teams, Bear Goldstein has been looking at the team outcomes of people who have more similar or different ways of seeing. Our hypothesis is that neural synchrony between team members will have two different kinds of effects. The first hypothesis is that higher neural synchrony between team members will reflect more similar ways of seeing and experiencing the world. This ought to lead to smoother communicatiom and more comfort with one another. We have seen lots of evidence for this such that those with higher neural synchrony in Gestalt cortex like their teams more and feel a greater sense of team belonging. The second hypothesis is that the nature of the team task will affect whether high neural synchrony is good or bad for team performance. Seeing things differently from one another (i.e. cognitive diversity) ought to improve performance on tasks where different perspectives would be advantageous (e.g. innovation tasks). In contrast, seeing things similarly ought to help performance on purely cooperative tasks. In this study, teams return on 3 separate occasions over a month and the results change over that time. While high neural synchrony enhances team performance on all tasks during the first testing session, by session 3, we see the expected results: neural synchrony helps team performance on a cooperative task, but neural diversity helps team performance on a creativity task.
We are now planning a study to look at the neuroscience of remote work. How does working over zoom or in person alter the neural synchrony of teammates and how does this in turn influence team performance and team connectedness.
Friendship
There are few things more important to our lives and well-being than friendship and yet it is one of the least studied topics in psychology. The loneliness epidemic is probably just as dangerous long-term as COVID and yet we are doing little as loneliness grows at work, at school, and in our personal lives. We are surrounded by large groups of people that undoubtedly contain people could be meaningful friends for us, but we have no idea how to identify those people or how to convert acquaintances into friendships. My company, Resonance, is working on the first of these problems using artificial intelligence. My lab at UCLA is currently focused on studying the second of these questions.
Grace Miao and Aga Plata have been studying what happens in the brain between two people who are getting to know each other for the first time. Some participants are asked to talk about a variety of shallow topics, whereas the other participants talk about deeper issues (e.g. talk about the last time you cried in front of someone else). It is known that discussing deep topics can promote friendship bonds quickly. We are interested in examine how neural synchrony shifts over the course of this conversation for those who move from feeling like strangers to feeling like they have a meaningful connection.
If you are interested in friendship, there is a group of UCLA faculty focused on friendship that you should consider including Jaimie Krems, Naomi Eisenberger, and Carolyn Parkinson.
Naive realism
Naive realism refers to treating our experience of the world as a direct reflection of objective reality without appreciating the ways our own mind has added to and idiosyncratically constructed what we experience (Ross & Ward, 1996). Naive realism leads to deep interpersonal conflicts because when others see things differently than we do, we assume they are crazy, stupid, biased or lying. If we see reality as it truly is and someone else claims to see something different, then there must be something wrong with them.
Although many studies have documented naive realism and its downstream effects, no one has really tried to look under the hood at why naive realism actually occurs. Why don’t we perpetually have the sense that our experience of reality is just one possible way of interpreting things and there are other very reasonable interpretations as well. One avenue we are exploring is that the act of CEEing, our effortless meaning making, literally inhibits alternative perspectives that we might have had.
Specifically, Christina Huber has run a series of studies demonstrating that once we form an interpretation of an ambiguous scene, we actually become less able to access words that describe an alternative interpretation of the scene. Importantly, in these studies, participants are simply asked whether the word presented is a real word (‘steal’) or a fake word (‘greal’). This suggests when the picture is connected to a first interpretation (e.g. ‘giving’), the alternative interpretation is actually inhibited making this interpretation seem more remote and implausible. This could have the effect of causing people to think less of others who see things in this alternative way.
Final thoughts
I hope this has helped you figure out whether my lab would be a good fit for your interests going forward. The focus of the lab is always changing as new ideas grab our attention and won’t let go. But this section describes most of the things we are currently doing and hope to do in the future. If those ideas grab your attention and won’t let go, then my lab might be the right place for you.