Research
I use a combination of evolutionary and cognitive psychology to study human mating.
Perception of Sexual Interest
Men tend to overestimate how interested women are in them. Or do they? This sex difference has been documented over and over again, and seems to square with intuitions, but are men overestimating or are women underreporting (or some combination)? My work, with collaborator Dr. Robert Kurzban, moves beyond the simple sex difference and examines the cognitive nuances of this phenomenon.
Physical Attractiveness
Another line of research, on which I collaborate with Dr. Jaime Cloud, examines how women's faces and bodies provide overlapping but separable caches of information about youth, health, and fertility. We run cognitive experiments to determine how men and women differentially prioritize facial and bodily attractiveness to make mating decisions.
Parent-Offspring Conflict
Working with Dr. Diana Fleischman and Dr. David Buss, I've looked at ways in which parents preferentially guard their daughters, rather than their sons, from early sexual activity. We have also researched the ways in which parents and offspring differ in their preferences for the traits of the offspring's mate.