Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University

Primary Advisor: S. Jim Sherman
Secondary advisor: Eliot R. Smith

My work is ultimately concerned with how people make sense of their social environments. In particular, I study the social-cognitive processes that shape the social world as it is perceived, with particular attention to the manner by which attention, language, and counterfactual thought function to construct mental representations of people and events—forming constructions that can be, and often are, fraught with biases and idiosyncrasies. My research has begun to move beyond simply clarifying how people arrive at such constructions of experience, to include the goal of understanding the consequences of such constructions. Specifically, I have lately been synthesizing and mobilizing my work on social-cognitive sense-making toward illuminating one of our most ubiquitous, mysterious, and consequential social judgments: the attribution of blame.          

Publications:

1. Percy, E.J., Hoffmann, J.L., & Sherman, S.J. (2011). 'Sticky metaphors' and the persistence of the voluntary manslaughter doctrine, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 44, 383-427. [[[ pdf ]]]
2. * Petrocelli, J.V., Percy, E.J., Sherman, S.J., & Tormala, Z.L. (2011). Counterfactual potency, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 30-46. [[[ pdf ]]]
3. Collins, E.C., Percy, E.J., Smith, E.R., & Kruschke, J.K. (2011) Integrating advice and experience: Learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 967-982. [[[ pdf ]]]
4. Sherman, S.J., Percy, E.J., & Mata, A. (2011). The role of language in constraining mental representations, judgments, and stereotypes. In M. Cadinu, S. Galdi, & A. Maass (Eds.), Social Perception, Cognition, and Language (109-122). University of Padova Press.[[[ pdf ]]]
5. Sherman, S.J., & Percy, E.J. (2011). The psychology of collective responsibility: When and why collective entities are likely to be held responsible for the misdeeds of individual members. Journal of Law and Policy, 19, 137-170. [[[ pdf ]]]
6. Percy, E.J., Sherman, S.J., Garcia-Marques, L., Mata, A., & Garcia-Marques, T. (2009). Cognition and native-language grammar: The organizational role of adjective-noun word order in information representation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16, 1037 – 1042. [[[ pdf ]]]
7. Sherman, J.W., Kruschke, J.K., Sherman, S.J., Percy, E.J., Petrocelli, J.V., & Conrey, F.R. (2009). Attentional processes in stereotype formation: A common model for category accentuation and illusory correlation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 305-323. [[[ pdf ]]]
8. Sherman, J.W., Sherman, S.J., Percy, E.J., & Soderberg, C. (in press). Stereotype development and formation. To appear in D. Carlston (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.
9. Hamilton, D.L., Way, N., Percy, E.J., & Sherman, S.J.  Convergence and divergence in perceptions of persons and groups.  In J. Simpson & J. Dovidio (Eds.), Interpersonal relations and group processes. Vol. II in M. Mikulincer & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of personality and social psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
10. Seger, C.R., Smith, E.R., Percy, E.J., & Conrey, F.R. (under review). Reach and and reduce prejudice: The impact of interpersonal touch on intergroup liking.

    ∗[Co-first authorship]

Research interests

My research is driven primarily by four questions, though the associated projects often straddle across them.

1) How do our language and embodied experiences influence the way we think?
A growing body of work has demonstrated that both language (e.g., metaphors, grammar conventions) and our physiological experiences in the environment (i.e., our concrete, embodied experiences in the physical world) form much of the construction of our cognitive experience. In fact, these two domains are closely intertwined--there is evidence to suggest that much of our abstract language develops from our grounded (embodied) experiences. As to these factors, my work has addressed the role of syntax in the categorization of social information (Percy et al., 2009, PB&R) as well as the manner in which interpersonal touch acts as an embodied metaphor of a close social relationship, reducing implicit prejudice (Seger, Smith, Percy, & Conrey, under review). In an upcoming paper bridging both domains, we explore the significance of metaphors for emotion (e.g., 'heat of passion') in determining how the behavior of social targets is explained and perceived (Percy, Hoffmann, & Sherman, 2011, University of MIchigan Journal of Law Reform).

2) How can social-cognitive phenomena, especially counterfactual thought, be quantitatively conceptualized and predicted?
One of the most satisfying aspects of psychological science is the ability we have not only to describe but also to explain and predict human behavior. To this end, I have always had an interest in models of social-cognitive processes. Initially, this work focused upon applications of attentional learning models to domains such as stereotyping (Sherman, Kruschke, Sherman, Percy, & Conrey, JPSP, 2009; Sherman et al., in press, Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition) and learning to trust social sources of information (Collins, Percy, Smith, & Kruschke, in press, JPSP). More recently, my focus has turned to developing a new model of how counterfactual thoughts influence judgment, using a construct called Counterfactual Potency (Petrocelli, Percy*, Sherman, & Tormala, 2011, JPSP).

3) What can language, embodiment, and cognitive models reveal about stereotype formation and use?
My work has applied attentional models of learning to explain the process of stereotype development (Sherman, Kruschke, Sherman, Percy, & Conrey, JPSP, 2009), investigated the implications of language characteristics for stereotype activation and use (Percy, et al., 2009, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review), and addressed the role of embodied experience (“literal intergroup contact”) on prejudice reduction (Seger, Smith, Percy, & Conrey, in preparation).

4) How do people assess blame and causation in the context of moral and legal reasoning?
Blame is a complicated animal. It involves a simultaneous moral and causal judgment, and work employing modern social-cognitive approaches to conceptualize and understand how blame judgments are made is surprisingly difficult to find. My dissertation work is focused upon how these moral and causal judgments interact at an implicit level to determine how blame is attributed, and in particular how social causal judgments are motivated by moral judgments of blame. I am also interested in the factors that influence the attribution of blame, especially in the applied domain of legal reasoning, such as language and embodied metaphor (Percy, Hoffmann, & Sherman, 2011, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) and entititivity (Sherman & Percy, 2011 Journal of Law and Policy). I also have a strong interest in applying our construct of counterfactual potency (Petrocelli, Percy*, Sherman, & Tormala, in press, JPSP) to better understand how blame is attributed.