Initially you wanted to be a journalist and then trained as both a social psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. Why social neuroscience?
A: It was a bit of an accident really. When I decided to switch from journalism, I explored a number of possible majors. It just so happened that psychology was in the same building with the journalism school, so one day during this dilemma, I saw the sign, walked into the chair's office, and he convinced me in 30 minutes to become a psychologist. When the time came for graduate school, I applied to a number of programs in different areas of psychology, including educational psychology, social psychology and personality psychology. During my social psychology interview, my future advisor, Susan Fiske, mentioned that she wanted to train a student simultaneously in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and wondered if I would be up for the challenge. I had never considered neuroscience before, and I had no background for it, but she was confident that I could do it. I thought long and hard, but saw it mostly as a challenge and an opportunity to do research no one else seemed to be doing, and to focus on issues that were important to me that had been overlooked. I said yes, and here I am.
How has your background prepared you to be a research scientist in your field?
A: A social neuroscientist must integrate a number of disparate fields to get a broader view of a social process. My background made me an expert in folk psychology, like we all are. As a journalist, I spent a lot of time wondering why people did the things they did. This translated really well into psychological research. I also had a strong statistical background because of my initial training for psychometrics. Since statistics is at the heart of all psychological research, this also proved a great benefit. Finally, I spent most of my schooling leading up to graduate school focusing on literature, philosophy, and history instead of chemistry, physics and biology, so I had training in more analytical disciplines. I was able to combine this with the hard-core sciences in graduate school, and that makes for a good social neuroscientist.
Your current research focuses on emotion, decision-making and social cognition. What obstacles do you have to overcome in order to conduct your research?
A: I believe the greatest obstacle is reconciling the inherent differences between social psychology and cognitive neuroscience manifested in their paradigms. Social neuroscientists must develop paradigms that truly capture the social phenomenon yet satisfy the necessary conditions for data collection in cognitive neuroscience. Traditional social psychological paradigms are one-shot between subject designs where the participant displays the studied behavior once in the experiment. Participants are in only one condition of the experimental design, and by testing enough participants we can begin to make inferences about their behavior. This is because social phenomena usually habituate quickly, that is, do not replicate a second and third and fourth time. Also, knowing what the different conditions are could bias the pure social effect you may observe if you were in just one condition. For instance, if I wanted to study how likely someone would be to help an injured person lying on a busy street, then chances are I can only create this situation one time for my participant, because by the time they encountered a second injured person or another injured person lying on a deserted street, they may begin to become suspicious and no longer behave as authentically as the first time. Traditional cognitive neuroscience paradigms require massive repeated measure, or having the participant do the same thing over and over again in all the conditions of the design, because the signal we pull from these measures is very weak and shrouded in noise. The repetition allows us to average out the noise and get a clearer sense of the underlying signal. So if I wanted to study vision perception in V1 (the part of the brain that first processes vision), then I can show checkerboards hundreds of times if I wanted to and still drive the signal in that brain region. Therein lies the problem; our charge is to use these kinds of techniques that require repeated measures to study social phenomenon that are fleeting and easily biased by repetition and knowledge of the different experimental conditions. The other big problem surrounds baseline. In social psychology, we compare men to women, or older people to younger people, and each serves as a control for the other. In cognitive neuroscience, we employ subtraction to pull out brain signals, so we usually compare something to nothing, giving us a very pure control. These are the greatest challenges facing the social neuroscientist.
You recently joined Duke as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. What attracted you to Duke?
A: I was attracted to Duke for three reasons, besides the fact that it was a top research university. The interdisciplinary nature of the university was very important. From the deans on down, everyone stressed how important interdisciplinary research was here at Duke. As an interdisciplinary scholar, this was very important to me. I don't want to appear as too much of a cognitive neuroscientist or too much of a social psychologist. Duke provides me a space to be my academic self. Second, the department had a strong representation in both cognitive neuroscience and social psychology, and that is a rare find. A lot of departments are biased one way or the other, so finding a place with good colleagues in both fields was a huge plus. Finally, the weather in Durham is far better than up the east coast. As an immigrant from Trinidad in the Caribbean, just above the equator, warmer weather was a big draw for me. After 10 years in the northeast, I longed for a milder winter. What do you hope to achieve with your research?
A: I hope to continue to add to the growing body of literature that would one day make real changes to the way we live together as human beings. I feel like a lot of social problems boil down to inferences we make about other people that in many cases are not accurate. This leads to unfair, immoral and violent behavior. We often see other people as a means to an end and do not consider their position, or think that others are threatening, evil, lazy, or stupid when they may simply be different. In the short term, I would like to understand more about social cognition, how we figure out other minds, and how this process is biased, manipulated, and evolves. In the longer term, I would like to use my research to tell more complete stories of the human condition.