Lisa Libby

There's an old saying, "Don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes." The logic of this advice draws on a fundamental truth of human psychology: an individual's perceptions of the world, and thus their reactions to it, are influenced by their subjective perspective. This truth helps explain why different people can react differently to the same situation, and also why the same person can react differently at different points in time. If you've ever looked back on a past relationship, business decision, or even fashion choice and wondered, "What was I thinking?!", you can appreciate the power of perspective.

Research in my lab investigates the mental processes underlying people's subjective perceptions of the world and of themselves. We seek to understand how these processes relate to cognition, emotion, and behavior; and to identify how subjective perceptions might be manipulated in ways that help people achieve goals, maintain emotional well-being, improve decision-making, and foster interpersonal and intergroup harmony.

A main line of research looks at perspective in a literal sense. When people think about events in their lives—recalling the past or imagining the future—they often "see" those events in their mind's eye. An intriguing fact about this imagery is that people don't always see events from their own first-person perspective, sometimes they use an observer's third-person perspective so that they see themselves in the image. Our research suggests that these two visual perspectives in mental imagery correspond to functionally distinct mindsets and thereby have a significant impact on the thoughts, feelings, and behavior that result from thinking about life events.

In several other lines of research we investigate how people's subjective experiences of the world, and also their awareness of the role of perspective, relate to political ideology, perceptions of social change, and involvement in political movements. Additional projects look at the factors that influence people's subjective experience when reading fictional narratives and thinking about historical events, and how such subjective experiences influence people’s beliefs and attitudes about themselves and the social world.