The questions behind my work.
My research asks how people make judgments when information is incomplete, socially loaded, or hard to interpret. I work across experiments, statistical modeling, large-scale text analysis, and machine learning at individual and population scales.
Research agenda
Four connected questions.
Together, they connect my work on judgment and social meaning with the systems I build.
Memory, context, and knowledge over time
How do people and organizations keep track of what happened, what changed, and what can be trusted?
I'm interested in how people and organizations preserve context, retrieve what matters, and revise decisions when new information appears.
Related work
- When the Specter of the Past Haunts Current Groups: Psychological Antecedents of Historical Blame
2024 | Published | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Language and social meaning
How does language reveal justification, outrage, socialization, identity, and public meaning?
Language can reveal meaning, identity, justification, and social interpretation when categories are defined clearly and checked against context.
Related work
- Why Reform Stalls: Justification and Outrage as Competing Public Responses to Police Violence
2025 | Preprint / IPR working paper | Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series, WP-25-31
- Racial Socialization in the United States
2025 | Published | Annual Review of Psychology
- From Data to Discovery: Unsupervised Machine Learning’s Role in Social Cognition
2025 | Published | Social Cognition
Judgment when evidence feels threatening
What happens to judgment when evidence threatens identity, integrity, certainty, or group meaning?
I study when people defend, revise, blame, or reinterpret, and how those responses change across situations.
Related work
- When the Specter of the Past Haunts Current Groups: Psychological Antecedents of Historical Blame
2024 | Published | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Why Reform Stalls: Justification and Outrage as Competing Public Responses to Police Violence
2025 | Preprint / IPR working paper | Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series, WP-25-31
Applied systems for memory and review
How can tools help people keep track of context, uncertainty, and decisions?
I'm interested in tools that keep context and uncertainty visible while leaving consequential judgments with the people responsible for them.
Related work
- From Data to Discovery: Unsupervised Machine Learning’s Role in Social Cognition
2025 | Published | Social Cognition
- Why Reform Stalls: Justification and Outrage as Competing Public Responses to Police Violence
2025 | Preprint / IPR working paper | Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Working Paper Series, WP-25-31