Understanding the Social Mind: Self, Closeness, and Decision-Making
How our sense of self and interpersonal closeness shape social cognition and decisions?
Our research explores how cognitive structures of the self and others shape social thinking, decision-making, and cooperation. We focus on how the organization and clarity of self-representations influence social decision performance, and how interpersonal closeness—conceptualized as the overlap between mental representations of the self and the other—can both facilitate and impair cognitive functioning. When individuals represent others as cognitively close to themselves, boundaries between self- and other-related information become blurred. This overlap can lead to decreased accuracy, slower decision-making, and reduced memory for one’s own choices in cooperative contexts.
- Self-concept clarity and decision performance: People with a clearer sense of self make more consistent and effective social decisions. – Uğurlar, P., & Wulff, D. U. (2022). Self-concept clarity is associated with social decision making performance. Personality and Individual Differences, 197, 111783.
- The cognitive cost of closeness: Interpersonal closeness, through overlapping self–other representations, reduces accuracy and slows decision-making in cooperative tasks. – Uğurlar, P., Sümer, N., & Posten, A. C. (2021). The cognitive cost of closeness: Interpersonal closeness reduces accuracy and slows down decision‐making. European Journal of Social Psychology, 51(6), 1007-1018.
- Closeness and memory: When the self and other are cognitively intertwined, people find it harder to recall their own cooperative choices. – Ugurlar, Pinar & Posten, Ann-Christin & Zürn, Michael. (2021). Interpersonal Closeness Impairs Decision Memory. Social Psychology, 52, 125-129.
Cooperation, Trust, and Group Dynamics
When shared identities and trust shape collective behavior?
This research line examines how people navigate cooperation, trust, and coordination within and between social groups. We investigate the cognitive and communicative processes that enable people to sustain cooperation, even in challenging social environments. Our findings show that shared social identities, typicality perceptions, and trust communication critically shape how people decide to act together.
- Shared identities increase cooperation: People cooperate more with others who share multiple group memberships, even when they differ in other social categories such as religion or politics. – Uğurlar, P., Dorrough, A. R., Isler, O., & Yilmaz, O. (2025). Shared group memberships mitigate intergroup bias in cooperation. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 16(2), 214-223.
- Typicality and trust: People tend to see “typical” individuals as more trustworthy, revealing a broad “typical-is-trustworthy” heuristic that privileges the familiar and may disadvantage minorities. – Alves, Hans & Ugurlar, Pinar & Unkelbach, Christian. (2021). Typical is Trustworthy – Evidence for a Generalized Heuristic. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13.
- Maintaining cooperation through trust: Expressing confidence in others’ goodwill—vertical communication of trust—helps sustain cooperation even after external sanctions are removed. – Maintaining Cooperation through Vertical Communication of Trust (working paper)
Culture, Ideology, and the Psychology of the Collective
How political and cultural contexts shape people’s views of the past and present?
This line of work investigates how ideology, collective memory, and historical context shape people’s social perceptions and emotional responses to societal change. We explore how individuals evaluate their nation’s trajectory, how ideological orientations relate to cultural nostalgia and pessimism, and how these patterns differ across societies with distinct historical developments.
- Ideology and cultural nostalgia: Conservatives and liberals differ in their perceptions of societal progress and decline, but these ideological differences depend on historical context—reversed in Türkiye compared to the United States. – Lammers, J., & Uğurlar, P. (2024). Political-ideological differences in cultural pessimism and nostalgia reflect people’s evaluation of their nation’s historical developments. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 15(3), 370-380.