RESEARCH

What do geopolitical conflict, collective bargaining, and team collaboration share in common? All three illustrate the ubiquitousness of collective action in human social life. The central goal of my research program is to understand the social cognitive abilities that allow our species to cooperate so successfully. I'm specifically interested in the role of social norms—the unspoken rules that govern human social interactions—in underlying cooperative behavior.

To better understand the social-cognitive processes that underlie collective action, I conduct behavioral experiments and survey research with children and adults, drawing on approaches from social & moral psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, & developmental psychology. Below I detail my the three main areas of my research program.

SOCIAL NORMS

Social norms play a foundational role in human social behavior and are particularly important for sustaining cooperative behavior. Two of the most well studied norms in psychology are descriptive norms, beliefs about how common a behavior is, and injunctive norms, beliefs about whether others' approve of or condone a behavior. In previous work, I investigated how descriptive norm information influences our injunctive norm beliefs and how that in turn influences our own behavior. I find that people readily update their beliefs and behavior after receiving descriptive norm information that a behavior is relatively common or uncommon, and that the extent to which we update varies substantially depending on the kind of behavior. In another paper, I explore this question in a developmental sample to better understand how social norm cognition emerges over childhood. In ongoing developmental research, I'm exploring whether children become increasingly influenced by their peers (as compared to adults) as they reach adolescence. More specifically, this project examines how the source of a norm (e.g., from a peer or adult) and its content (e.g., prosocial or antisocial) interact to influence children’s norm learning across development. In my most recent work, I've begun to investigate how we perceive and distinguish between different types of moral norms (e.g., harm norms vs fairness norms) in order to better understand how the content of a norm influences it's effectiveness.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CRINGE: MEASURING CRINGE SENSITIVTY

Imagine you're at a company meeting and your coworkers presents a collaboration-themed rap song which they perform (poorly) to the entire company. As a member of the audience, we may feel deeply uncomfortable watching such a spectacle—that is, we may "cringe" at watching someone embarrass themselves so thoroughly. Cringe is a social emotion closely related to vicarious embarrassment and social norms. In collaboration with Dr Shaon Lahiri, I'm exploring the psychology of cringe in order to better understand whether and how cringe differs from other social emotions such as vicarious embarrassment or shame, as well as developing a personality scale to measure trait differences in cringe sensitivity. Ultimately, we hope to explore how differences in cringe perception influence the effectiveness of political, public health, and marketing campaigns.

MOTIVATIONS OF PUNISHMENT

My research also explores an important tool for maintaining cooperation: punishment. In one project investigating the motivations that underlie punishment, we find that punishment is strongly motivated by revenge–the desire to reciprocate losses–and weakly motivated by inequity aversion–the dislike of unfairness. In another project investigating the unique inputs of human punishment, I have explored whether cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) are similarly sensitive to their partner's intent when they transgress. This work finds that unlike humans, cleaner fish show no evidence of sensitivity to intent when punishing, highlighting the unique role it serves in human punishment. In ongoing work, I’m investigating how we view people who punish others and how our beliefs about their intentions and motivations shape our evaluations of their actions. Lastly, I’m also exploring whether, like adults, children engage in third party punishment as a signal of their trustworthiness and cooperative intent. The findings from this work will inform our understanding of why we intervene as uninvolved third-parties and when we’re likely to do so.