Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Office location
University of Delaware, 105 The Green, Room 436, Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716
Lab
5 Courtney Street, Newark, DE
Education
- Ph.D. – Princeton University
- M.A. – Princeton University
- B.S. – Columbia University
Biography
Other people are boundless sources of social information. We try to understand the people around us by making inferences based on their appearances, their behavior, and their preferences. In fact, we make these judgments based upon incredibly thin slices of experience, often with far-reaching downstream consequences for our treatment of other people. However, thin slices don’t always tell the whole story and initial impressions are often violated. Even basic perceptual evaluations may be subject to top-down influences: the same smile on the face of a friend may convey a much different message on the face of a foe. As such, our perceptions and understanding of others is continuously revised and recontextualized in light of multiple channels of social information.
My work aims to uncover the social cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie how we dynamically perceive and learn about other people, using techniques from experimental social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, and perceptual psychophysics. My primary research program applies this approach to a consequential societal problem: racial disparities in health care. Specifically, this research examines perceptual contributions to racial bias in pain treatment, as part of a broader line of work on top-down influences on social perception. My secondary research program concerns the neural bases of impression formation, updating, and generalization. Taken together, my work offers insights into dynamic social perception and cognition and by extension, provides a framework for understanding societal-level phenomena like disparities in health care and intergroup bias. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the National Institute of Nursing Research.
— Peter Mende-Siedlecki, Associate Professor, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Courses Regularly Taught
PSYC207 Research Methods
NSCI442 Social Neuroscience
Research Projects
Areas: Social psychology, human neuroimaging
There are pervasive racial and ethnic disparities in medical treatment in the United States. For instance, the pain of Black patients is systematically under-diagnosed and under-treated, compared to the pain of Whites. While other research has examined higher-level factors fueling such biases (e.g., perceptions of status, stereotypes about biological differences between Blacks and Whites), we're interested in examining whether racial biases in pain recognition might also stem from a perceptual basis. We've observed that pain on Black faces is less readily perceived than pain on White faces, stemming from a disruption in configural processing associated with other-race faces. Further, these biases in perception predict biases in treatment behavior. Currently, we're exploring the neural bases of these biases, examining whether these biases are observable in medical health professionals, and beginning to develop interventions designed to attenuate these perceptual contributions to racial biases in pain recognition.
How does the brain support our ability to change our minds about other people? Using fMRI, we've observed that impression updating is supported neurally by a distributed network of brain regions and that activity in a subset of these regions (in particular, vlPFC & IFG) is preferential for diagnostic changes in behavior, beyond mere moment-to-moment inconsistencies. Critically, we've observed that perceptions of behavioral frequency are a critical factor in the updating process: behaviors that are perceived to be more rare (e.g., highly immoral or highly competent behaviors) drive updating on both behavioral and neural levels. We're currently using computational modeling approaches to better characterize the neural dynamics supporting updating — for example, to examine how this sort of complex social learning is contextualized and generalized.
Recent Publications
Haas, S.*, Mullin, G.*, Williams, A., Reynolds, A. Tuerxuntuoheti, A., Reyes P., Mende-Siedlecki, P. (in press). Racial bias in pediatric pain perception. Accepted at the Journal of Pain. Preprint available at https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr745351. *Shared first author
Huang, Y., Miller, T., Awad, C., Reyes P., Tuerxuntuoheti, A., & Mende-Siedlecki, P. (2024). Target weight and gender moderate anti-Black bias in pain perception. Social Psychology and Personality Science. Data and materials available at https://osf.io/289nk/.
Hackel, L., Kalkstein, D., & Mende-Siedlecki, P. (2024). Simplifying social learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,28(5), 428-440.
