Sara D. Hodges

Sara D. Hodges
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Oregon

1227 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR, 97403-1227 USA
Phone (541) 346-4919
Fax (541) 346-4911
email address: sdhodges@darkwing.uoregon.edu

Education

B.A., Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, 1989.
Ph.D., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1995.

Teaching

Psy 199: Human Nature College Connections class (Fall, 2005)
Psy 199: 7 Deadly Sins College Connections class (Fall, 2007)
Psy 202: Mind and Society (Fall, 2007)
Psy 303: Research Methods in Psychology (Fall, 1999)
Honors College 431: Normal People Behaving Badly (Spring, 2008)
Psy 456: Social Psychology (Spring 2002)
Psy 458: Judgment and Decision Making(Spring, 1999)
Psy 460: Self and Other (Winter, 2004)
Psy 607: Self and Other (with Bertram Malle, Fall, 1996)
Psy 607: The Construction of Attitudes and Beliefs (Spring, 1998)
Psy 607: Comparison Processes, Self and Otherwise (Winter, 2006)
Psy 607: Perspective Taking and Empathy (Spring, 2004)
Psy 616: Issues in Contemporary Psychology: Social & Personality (Spring, 2003)
Decision Making Reading Group
Human Nature Pathway (Fall 2000 to Spring 2001)
Human and Animal Behavior Freshman Interest Group (Fall 2001)
Anthropology and Psychology Freshman Interest Group (Fall, 2003)

Research Interests

I study how people construct judgments of their social world. I am interested in the "building blocks" we use to form attitudes and make decisions about the people and things around us, and how we organize this information.

Take a look at a new book, edited by Bertram Malle and me!
Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide Between Self and Others

Feature matching in judgment and decision making

One current line of research investigates how people make decisions between options with shared and unique characteristics, specifically examining how people treat these two kinds of characteristics differently, and how this affects their comparisons. When people try to decide between two options that have both shared and unique characteristics, they match up the shared attributes and concentrate on the unique ones to make their choice. I am studying what happens when they are subsequently given a third option. People appear to cancel out the shared features in earlier options, and do not use them in making subsequent decisions. I am also examining decision contexts that may inhibit or prevent the use of feature matching as a judgment strategy, and whether feature matching is used in self/other comparisons.

Perspective Taking and Empathy

What does it mean to take another person's perspective? I'm interested in both cognitive outcomes of perspective taking (e.g., empathic accuracy) as well as affective ones (how does it affect our relationship with the person whose perspective we took?). Most recently, I have been looking at how similarity of experience and motivation affect empathy. I am also intrigued by how fiction writers take their characters' perspectives, which I view as a special case of perspective taking, in which the perspective must be totally constructed, rather than simply "taken."

Affective expectations

If we are really looking forward to a vacation but it turns out to be rather disappointing, will we later remember and evaluate the vacation negatively, or will our memories and evaluations be boosted by our initially positive expectations such that we remember the vacation as being better than it actually was? How much we expect to enjoy something and what we think it will be like can influence later evaluations of the event as well as decisions about whether or not we decide to repeat the experience. It appears that people are often guided by their positive expectations, even when these expectations conflict with actual experiences, but it is not clear whether negative expectations operate in a parallel way.

Papers

Taylor, M., Hodges, S. D., & Kohanyi, A. (2003). Fictional people with minds of their own: Characters created by adult novelists and imaginary companions created by children. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 22, 361-380.

Hodges, S. D., Johnsen, A. T., & Scott, N. S. (2002). You're like me, no matter what you say. Psychologica Belgica, 42, 107-112. (abstract)

Hodges, S. D., Bruininks, P., & Ivy, L. (2002). It's different when I do it: Feature matching in self-other comparisons. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 40-53. (abstract)

Hodges, S. D., & Hollenstein, T. (2001). Direction of comparison in typicality judgments. Social Cognition, 19, 601-624. (abstract)

Hodges, S. D., & Klein, K. J. K. (2001). Regulating the costs of empathy: The price of being human. Paper invited for Journal of Socioceconomics, 30, 437-452.

Klein, K. J. K., & Hodges, S. D. (2001). Gender differences, motivation and empathic accuracy: When it pays to understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 720-730. (abstract)

Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (2000). Talking about safe sex: The role of expectations and experience. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 30, 330-349.

Hodges, S. D. (1998). Reason for the referent: Reducing direction of comparison effects. Social Cognition, 16, 367-390. (abstract)

Hodges, S. D. (1997). When matching up features messes up decisions: The role of feature matching in successive choices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1310-1321.

Hodges, S. D. & Wegner, D. M. (1997). The mental control of empathic accuracy. In W. Ickes (Ed.), Empathic Accuracy (pp. 311-339). New York: Guilford.

Erber, M. W., Hodges, S. D. & Wilson, T. D. (1995). Thought and attitude strength. In R. Petty & J. Krosnick, (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp.. 433-454). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Wilson, T. D., Hodges, S. D. & LaFleur, S. J. (1995). Effects of introspecting about reasons: Inferring attitudes from accessible thoughts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 16-28.

Klaaren, K. J., Hodges, S. D. & Wilson, T. D. (1994). The role of affective expectations in subjective experience and decision-making. Social Cognition, 12, 77-101.

Hodges, S. D. & Wilson, T. D. (1993). The effect of analyzing reasons on attitude change: The moderating role of attitude accessibility. Social Cognition, 11, 353-366.

Wilson, T. D., Lisle, D. J., Schooler, J. W., Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J. & LaFleur, S. J. (1993). Introspecting about reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 331-339.

Wilson, T. D. & Hodges, S. D. (1992). Attitudes as temporary constructions. In L. Martin and A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgment (pp. 37-65). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Manuscripts

Hodges, S. D., Klein, K. J. K., Veach, D., & Villanueva, R. Giving birth to empathy: The effects of similar experience on empathic accuracy, empathic concern, and perceived empathy. (abstract)