Department of Psychology Harvard University 33 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Fax: (617) 495-3728 Tel: (617) 495-9138 Email: lieber@wjh.harvard.edu Personal Home Page Vita

Current Research Interests:

Currently, I am working on several different projects spanning the continuum of psychology from cross-cultural research on attribution processes to cognitive neuroscientific investigations into the role of the basal ganglia in human intuition. I consider myself a social psychologist, in large part, because the questions that interest me tend to be social psychological ones about social inference, attribution, nonverbal communication, attitudes, stereotyping and self-esteem. I have come to be increasingly invested in the methodologies of cognitive neuroscience because I believe that these methodologies can shed additional light on social psychological phenomena.

Current Research Projects:

(a) My dissertation examined the role of central executive working memory processes in introverts and extraverts as it relates to nonverbal decoding and impairments of social multi-tasking in introverts.

(b) I am currently working with Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) on predictive sequencing in patients with Huntington's disease. Next year I will be a post-doctural student of Barbara Knowlton's (UCLA) and together we plan to examine the role of the basal ganglia in social intuition.

(c) Together with Daniel Gilbert, I am looking at mispredictions in the willingness to forgive a hypothetical transgression. One piece of this research centers on the notion that people know that painfulness of a transgression is related to the closeness of the transgressor, but that people ignore the equally true notion that our desire and willingness to forgive is also related to the closeness of the transgressor.

(d) Kevin Ochsner, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Schacter and myself are examining whether conscious deliberation and episodic recall skill have any necessary role in cognitive dissonance reduction. Currently, we are testing Brehm's (1956) free choice dissonance paradigm on amnesics.

(e) Jonathon Goldin and I are examining the role of explicit and implicit self-esteem in mediating the activation of particular self-related representations that have been shown to facilitate or enhance performance in a specific cognitive domain (Shih, Pittinsky & Ambady, 1998)

(f) Daniel Gilbert and I are looking at whether the cognitive sequential components of the attribution process vary cross-culturally.
 

Current Teaching:

Psychology 987d: Social Cognitive Neuroscience with Kevin Ochnser.