My main research interests are in how people construct their identities and maintain relatively favorable self-views, and in the processes by which negative evaluations of people and their behavior are translated into ascriptions of blame and the imposition of sanctions. Topics I have studied in the self-enhancement area include the "better-than-average" effect (the tendency for people to evaluate themselves more positively than an average peer on most characteristics), and the genius effect (the tendency for people to exaggerate the abilities of those who outperform them).
With regard to identity construction, my students and I are conducting research on the "local dominance effect," which is the finding that people define their abilities with reference to their standing in relation to a few immediately present peers, and largely ignore far more valid data about their general standing in relevant populations.
My research in the area of blame and responsibility stems from my "culpable control" model of blame. The culpable control model assumes that people generally adhere to cultural prescriptions for assigning blame (i.e., assessing intention, causation, foresight and mitigating circumstances) but are also influenced by their automatic evaluations of the actors involved, their behaviors, and the outcomes that occur. When negative evaluations are strong, observers assess the evidence from a "blame validation" vantage, in which they exaggerate the strength of evidence that supports a blame attribution, deemphasize contradictory evidence, or change the threshold for how strong the evidence must be for assigning blame.