Getting personal- How does social reasoning reflect individualized knowledge of others?

Erik Brockbank · February 13, 2026

Ask anyone what matters most to them and the answer is likely to be other people: partners, parents, children, friends. We know so much about the people we are close to: how they like their coffee, if they dance well, how they look when they’re angry, whether they tend to be outgoing or organized. This knowledge isn’t just trivia; we rely on it from one moment to the next to gossip with them, offer advice, make plans with them, and more. How do we get to know others so deeply and how does this knowledge inform the ways we think and act? I’ll present two recent lines of work that seek to explain the personal nature of social cognition by combining theoretical insights from person perception and theory of mind. The first line of work investigates the conditions under which people use features of an actor’s personality to explain their behavior. Using a gridworld task that allows for fine-grained control over agents and their environments, participants evaluate why different agents succeed and fail in different contexts. We find that people balance the evidence for internal, agent-based causes and external, situational ones when explaining behavior; this illustrates the role that durable, trait-like information plays in causal reasoning about others’ actions. The second line of work explores how we get to know others in conversation. In a series of studies, we find that different questions vary in the perceived depth of information they provide about a speaker; further, the diverse ways people answer these questions support individualized predictions about their personality. Taken together, this work seeks to explain how we navigate a complex social world filled with unique individuals.