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 & developmental psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive science. I detail the three main topics of my current research program below.
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. I have also explore this question with a developmental sample to better understand how social norm cognition emerges over childhood. I'm currently investigating 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'm investigating how we perceive and distinguish between different domains of moral norms (e.g., harm, fairness, etc.) in order to better understand whether 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. 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. We theorize that cringe is a social emotion closely related to, but distinct from, vicarious embarrassment, that motivationally underlies social norm compliance and enforcement. We also develop and validate a new individual differences scale of cringe sensitivity which we find predicts state perceptions of cringe as well as behavioral intentions and donation behavior. 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 explored whether cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) are sensitive to their partner's intent after a transgression. 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.