He leads interdisciplinary research on storytelling and the human mind, exploring how people experience, interpret, and narrate the events in their lives. A central focus of his research is on the abstract knowledge that enables interpretation of experiences, including the expectations that people have of everyday activity contexts and the commonsense theories that people have of their own psychology. In support of his research goals, he has pioneered methods for collecting and analyzing personal storytelling on a massive scale, identifying tens of millions of narratives posted to Internet weblogs.