Research
I study attraction and social cognition as problems of inference under uncertainty: people rarely have direct access to another person's interest, intention, attraction, or consent, so they must infer it from noisy cues.
"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."
Ursula K. Le Guin · The Left Hand of Darkness
01
Attraction changes what people notice, how they interpret ambiguous signals, and what decisions feel worth making. I am especially interested in when these judgments become biased, and how to distinguish sensitivity from response bias.
02
Why do people sometimes overestimate sexual interest, and how do desire, priors, costs, and ambiguous evidence shape those judgments? Recent work extends this logic to consent clarity and the sampling of absence, refusal, and withdrawal.
03
How do behavioral and physiological coordination, including mimicry and synchrony, contribute to attraction and the formation of pair bonds?
04
Comparative work helps test which attraction-related cognitive mechanisms generalize beyond humans, and which are shaped by specifically human social environments.
Attraction is a noisy signal problem.
NWA Wetenschapscommunicatie · with Gemeente Leiden
I lead an NWA-funded citizen science project, in collaboration with Gemeente Leiden, involving young adolescents in designing and exploring their own questions about attraction, love, and social cognition.
Collaboration · Fleur Bouwer (NWO XS)
I collaborate with Fleur Bouwer on her NWO XS project on physiological synchrony during shared music: when people listen and move together, do their bodies fall into alignment, and does that alignment track prosocial behaviour? The work links rhythm, coordination, and social closeness.