Research

Collective action problems—situations in which cooperation is mutually beneficial but individually costly—have been a recurrent challenge throughout human history and comprise some of the most pressing societal issues we face today, from climate change to the AI arms race. Addressing these problems requires first understanding the psychological abilities and social tools that have allowed our species to overcome immediate self-interest in pursuit of collective, socially-beneficial goals.

My research program investigates the psychological abilities that make collective action possible by allowing us to successfully coordinate with others, punish free riders, and conform to social norms. To do this, my work draws on a range of perspectives spanning social cognition, moral psychology, and behavioral economics, and utilizes a combination of methods including economic games, survey experiments, developmental samples, and psychometric approaches including structural equation modeling and scale construction. While I’m broadly interested in the intersection of morality and cooperation, my most recent research investigates how social norms influence our beliefs and behavior, their role in collective action, and whether people vary in their sensitivity to social norm conformity. I detail the four main areas of my current research program below.

Social norms

Why is it okay to eat donuts for breakfast but not cake or cookies? Why is it rude to belch after eating in some cultures but not others? Why do we judge a coworker who takes more than their fair share of birthday cake in the break room? Social norms are the unwritten and tacit rules that guide and constrain human social behavior. They play a critical role in human social behavior and are particularly important for sustaining cooperation in collective action problems. My research explores the cognitive abilities and psychological mechanisms that underlie social norm cognition. For example, I’ve studied how the commonality of a behavior influences moral and social attitudes in children and adults to better understand how social norm learning emerges over development. In a recent paper, I investigated the role of belief internalization in underlying judgements of social conventions and moral norms like harm and fairness. In future work, I plan to further investigate the role of internalization in moral cognition—particularly its relationship to moral objectivity—and explore how individual differences can explain differences in social conformity and normative influence.

Self-conscious emotions and cringe

Imagine you're at a company retreat and the CEO performs a collaboration-themed rap to the entire company's trapped workforce. We often feel deeply uncomfortable witnessing awkward and inappropriate social behavior like this—that is, we may "cringe" at seeing someone embarrass themselves so thoroughly. In my most recent line of work, I’m investigating the nature and function of cringe in human social life. For example, we’ve created and validated a novel individual differences scale of trait cringe sensitivity—which you can take here—which we use to investigate how cringe relates to vicarious embarrassment and influences social attitudes and behavior. We’re also creating a citizen science platform (CringeScale.com) so anyone around the world can complete the scale and participate in related research projects. This platform will serve as the cornerstone of a broader research program investigating the role of social emotions in explaining differences in norm conformity and enforcement. We hope to apply this work to inform norm-based messaging interventions for political, public health, & marketing information campaigns.

Punishment motivations and evaluations

My research also explores an important tool for maintaining cooperation: punishment. In one project investigating the motivations that underlie punishment, I found that punishment was strongly motivated by revenge—the desire to reciprocate losses—and weakly motivated by inequity aversion—the dislike of unfairness. I've also investigated the unique inputs of human punishment, exploring whether cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) are sensitive to their partner's intent after a transgression. I found that Cleaner fish were insensitive 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 working on a project exploring the developmental trajectory of reputational concerns in motivating third-party punishment.

Cognitive abilities that underlie coordination

A central feature of collective action is the ability to coordinate our behavior with others, whether it’s deciding which side of the road to drive on, organizing a protest, or hitting a fundraising goal. In work conducted during my PhD, I investigated the role of common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states—in underlying coordination, finding that common knowledge increased cooperative behavior by decreasing uncertainty that others would also cooperate. I’ve also examined when this ability emerges in development, finding that children are able to use common knowledge to coordinate by 6 years of age, highlighting the early-emerging and foundational role of common knowledge in human cooperation. Together, this work advances our understanding of the cognitive abilities that allow individuals to successfully coordinate their behavior for collective goals.