  | Laboratory of Lasana Harris, Ph.D. |   | | |
| | Philosophers have long puzzled over the mind, asking how we know that our interactions are indeed with our loved ones not sophisticated android impersonators, or why is it right to dismember agent-like machines not our friends? Dr. Harris’ lab transforms philosophical thought experiments to empirical psychological questions. How do we see people as less than human, and non-human objects as human beings? How do we modulate affective responses to people? How do we decide right from wrong? By combining social psychology, affective and cognitive neuroscience with philosophy of mind, we create a comprehensive research strategy to explore human behavior. Humanized perception is malleable because people can take away human attributes like mental life from other people, but imbue mental lives to animals and objects that presumably lack minds (like ours); people make internal attributions to objects for behavior just as readily as they do to people. The lab uses a social neuroscience approach to explore the neural correlates of person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning, social emotions, empathy, and punishment. The Harris lab explores the separate yet overlapping neural networks involved when people make attributions to people, animals and objects. Moreover the lab examines the affective correlates of these processes and their subsequent influence on helping, punishment, and decision-making.
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