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Brase Lab

Department of Psychological Sciences
Kansas State University
492 Bluemont Hall
1114 Mid-Campus Dr North
Manhattan, Kansas 66506-5302

785-532-6850
785-532-5401 fax
psych@ksu.edu

What we do

Research in Dr. Brase's lab uses evolutionary approaches to understanding the nature of human rationality. In terms of traditional areas within psychology, our research is at the intersection of cognitive psychology (reasoning, judgments and decision-making) and social psychology (interpersonal relations, social perception, and persuasion). Some of the specific topics of our research are:

Statistical judgments under uncertainty

Presenting numerical information in different ways (e.g., as frequencies or as single-event probabilities) changes how people use that information and even how that information is perceived. Dr. Brase is interested both in the competence issues related to this phenomenon (i.e., how different presentations of statistical information can influence performance and apparent rationality) as well as applied issues (e.g., how subjective perceptions of numbers in certain formats as either "large" or "small" can influence subsequent evaluations and persuasiveness).

Domain-specific reasoning

Formal logic says that reasoning should be based only on the structure, or syntax, of statements. When people actually reason about meaningful statements, however, they use the content of that information to make conclusions that formal logic does not allow. Some of Dr. Brase's research seeks to illuminate what aspects of particular contents are keys to understanding how people reason about those contents. For example, he has previously studied the effects of social group information (group membership and group markers) on inferences made across different reasoning tasks.

Social decision making

Particular categories of interpersonal relationships have specific and important implications for the actors, both from an immediate standpoint and as evolutionarily recurrent situations. Intersexual relationships, for example, have important dimensions that reflect both the present situations in which men and women find themselves and the (sometimes discordant) evolved predispositions of both sexes. Dr. Brase's work, with a number of collaborators, has studied the nature of sex differences in reasoning and decision-making within the context of various social situations such as perceptions of sexual harassment, self-esteem, perceptions of physicians, and evaluations of physical attractiveness.