Associate ProfessorAndrew Vonasch

The physical world is visible. The social world is invisible.

Every human mind is fundamentally private. We cannot directly observe another person's thoughts, motives, intentions, or values. Yet we spend nearly every waking moment navigating a world of invisible minds. We judge what other people intended, what motivated their actions, whether an act of kindness is sincere, whether a sacrifice reflects genuine commitment, or whether a stated reason is merely an excuse. We perform these inferences so effortlessly that we rarely notice we are solving one of the most fundamental cognitive problems of social life.

This mystery originally drew me to psychology through an interest in consciousness. I was fascinated by the prospect that scientists could study something directly accessible only to the person experiencing it. Over time, that fascination evolved into a related but more tractable question:

How do we navigate a world of invisible minds?

My research explores one of the central ways humans solve this problem: using the words people choose, the actions they take, the sacrifices they make, and the tradeoffs they accept as clues to what is happening in other minds. I study the psychological principles people use to interpret these clues and make sense of other minds. Those interpretations shape everything from moral judgment and cooperation to conflict, politics, and everyday social interaction.

More recently, I have become equally interested in the complementary side of this process. If our words and actions leave traces of our minds, people also learn to shape those traces. We reveal, conceal, justify, exaggerate, and sometimes misrepresent our motives in order to influence how others interpret us. Understanding both how people make sense of other minds and how people strategically shape the traces they leave behind forms the core of my research program.

From questions about moral character and free will to political conflict and artificial intelligence, I am ultimately trying to understand how humans navigate a world of invisible minds.

I investigate these questions using laboratory experiments, online experiments, field studies, and analyses of naturally occurring data. My research emphasizes rigorous experimental methods, transparency, and the principles of open science.