Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he directs the Applied Cooperation Initiative (ACI). His research focuses on altruism: understanding how it works and how to promote it. He collaborates with governments, nonprofits, and companies to apply the lessons of this research towards addressing real-world challenges like increasing energy conservation, improving antibiotic adherence, reducing smoking in public places, and promoting philanthropy.

Thomas Costello is a research psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He studies the nexus between personality and politics, and has published research widely on topics spanning the psychology of authoritarianism, personality disorders, the cognitive causes and correlates of political ideology, psychopathy, intellectual humility and cognitive biases, financial decision-making, sexual objectification, beliefs in free will and determinism, conspiracy theories, machine learning for scale development, and more. His work has been the central focus of articles in The Atlantic, New York Times, New York Post, and New Statesman, and it has "gone viral" on social media--being read about and/or commented on by millions. He’s often interviewed on podcasts and quoted in the media. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University in 2022.

Hause Lin is a postdoctoral fellow. He studies how people make decisions and likes to find answers to research (and life) questions by using ideas, theories, and data from different sources. He enjoys applying all sorts of models to rich datasets to gain insights into how people think and behave.

Michael N. Stagnaro is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Management Science, the Department of Psychology at Yale University, and the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. His interests involve social cognitive models of belief formation, belief defense, religious cognition and ideological communities. His work takes a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing both theoretical and methodological tools from social and cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, cultural anthropology, and game theory, both in the context of online experiments and in field studies.

Ben Tappin is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, his research focus is understanding the political beliefs and attitudes of the (mainly European and American) public. Using a combination of methods including survey experiments, analyses of large social survey data and computational modelling, he tries to answer questions such as: What causes persistent public disagreement over political issues? What strategies do people use to learn about politics and political questions? How can society encourage the use of scientific evidence in political decision-making? Beyond his specific research focus, he is enthusiastic about open science practices, philosophy of science and the R programming language.

Jenny Allen is a PhD student in the marketing group at MIT Sloan interested in misinformation, news, and social networks. She graduated with a BA in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale in 2016. Prior to MIT, she worked at Facebook as a software engineer and Microsoft Research as a Research Assistant for the Computational Social Science group.

Cameron Martel is a graduate student at MIT Sloan School of Management. His research explores the cognitive processes underlying the belief and spread of misinformation. He is also broadly interested in social and political behavior online, particularly on social media platforms. In his research, he uses a variety of approaches from cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, and computational social science. He received his BS in cognitive science from Yale University. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Reed Orchinik is a PhD student in management science at MIT Sloan. He's interested in the motivations for and barriers to prosocial and cooperative behavior, especially in addressing climate change. Before starting at MIT, Reed completed a BA in economics and political science at Swarthmore College and worked for two years as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Adam Bear is a former graduate student in the HCL and is now a research scientist at Harvard University. He is interested in how people navigate the tradeoff between using unconscious heuristics and relying on more conscious deliberation to make judgments and decisions. He has recently been exploring how principles from statistics—specifically, the "bias-variance dilemma"—may help explain when and why people sometimes use simple prediction strategies even when more complex methods of reasoning are available at no extra cost. Beyond these research interests, he is enthusiastic about getting more people to use Bayesian statistics and changing norms about academic publishing.

Syon Bhanot is a faculty member in Economics at Swarthmore College. Syon uses experimental methods to develop and test theories from behavioral economics, social psychology, public economics, and development economics. He specializes in using field experiments, conducted with real world organizations as partners, to explore cooperative behavior, motivation, and decision making in a variety of areas (including financial and environmental behavior). He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2015, and also an holds an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. from Princeton University.

Nadia Brashier is a faculty member at UCSD. She studies memory and judgment across the lifespan, with a specific focus on cognitive “shortcuts” people use to evaluate truth. Her research identifies why young and older adults fall for fake news and misinformation.

Matt Cashman is interested the mechanisms underlying human decision-making, learning (particularly moral learning) and cooperation (What conditions lead to cooperation? How can we use this understanding to produce more cooperation?). He investigates these questions using a combination of behavioral and pharmacological methods as well as computational models.

Cathy Xi Chen is broadly interested in judgment and decision making, behavioral economics, and computational social science. Her research explores social and online behaviors, such as motivation and preferences, belief formation and updating. Before coming to MIT, she received her M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago, and her B.S. in Psychology, Economics, and Statistics from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.

Moshe Hoffman applies game theory to address psychological questions, such as why we speak indirectly and why we consider lies of commission worse than lies of omission, with the help of models of evolution and learning dynamics and experimental tools from economics and psychology. Moshe got his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and is currently a Research Scientist at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and a lecturer at MIT's Department of Economics.

Nils Wernerfelt is an assistant professor in the marketing department at the Kellogg School of Management. His main research interests include online marketing, digital platforms, and analytics. Prior to joining Kellogg he was a Director on the Economics and Policy Research team at Meta and received his PhD in economics from MIT.

Chloe Wittenberg is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, where she also received her PhD in Political Science in 2023. Her research spans the fields of political behavior, communication, and psychology—with a particular focus on misinformation. She is especially interested in using surveys and experimental methods to better understand how people process and respond to political messaging.

Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang is interested in Wisdom of Crowds and behavioral economics in general. In particular, he studies how people react under influence in the context of revealed confidence as well as motivated reasoning. He uses theory-backed experimental designs to identify the causal link of his hypotheses and analyzes field data for solving real-world problems.

Brian Guay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University in the spring of 2021, where he was a member of the Duke Polarization Lab and Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology. His research is at the intersection of political behavior and methodology, with a specific focus on misinformation, polarization, and social media. He draws on theories from cognitive and social psychology and use a wide range of methods, including field experiments, surveys, and natural language processing with social media data. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

Ziv Epstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. His work integrates aspects of computational social science and design to model and understand cooperative and sociotechnical systems. He focuses on new challenges and oppurtunities that emerge from a digital society, particularly in the domains of artificial intelligence and social media. Before coming to MIT, he received his BA in computer science mathematics from Pomona College.

Rebecca Littman’s research focuses on collective violence, group identification, and behavior change. For example, how does engaging in extreme behavior on behalf of one’s group influence identity and social relationships? She uses a range of experimental and descriptive methods to tackle related questions in the US and in conflict-affected countries such as Liberia and Nigeria. In particular, she has an interest in developing theoretically informed interventions to test in field settings. Rebecca received her PhD in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University. She is now a faculty member in the Psychology Department at UIUC.

Mohsen Mosleh research interests lie at the intersection of computational and social sciences. In particular, he studies misinformation on online social media, social networks (and population structure in general), and social norms. In his research, he uses theoretical models based on evolutionary game theory, network science, agent-based modeling as well as empirical (data-driven) models based on online behavioral experiments on networks, machine learning, and natural language processing. Prior to MIT, he was at the department of psychology at Yale as a Postdoc. He received his PhD in engineering with a graduate certificate in Business Intelligence and Analytics, Masters in Management, and BSc in Engineering. He is now a faculty member at the University of Exeter.

Gordon Kraft-Todd is generally interested in how to encourage prosocial behavior using the cognitive mechanisms underlying the colloquial wisdom of “actions speak louder than words”, “practice what you preach”, and “lead by example.” Specifically, he investigates how the interaction of actor speech and behavior affects observer belief transmission and behavioral contagion using field experiments, behavioral research, and computational modelling. He received his B.A. with a self-designed major in Leadership from Harvard College in 2007. He anticipates defending his Ph.D. in Psychology at Yale University in spring 2019. He is excited to be joining the Morality Lab at Boston College under the direction of Liane Young as a postdoctoral researcher in summer 2019.

Jillian Jordan was a graduate student in HCL from 2014-2018. She is now a faculty member at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates the functions of human social cognition and behavior, with a focus on cooperation and morality. Jillian integrates approaches from psychology, experimental economics, and evolutionary game theory. She is interested in questions like: Why do humans condemn others for immoral or selfish behavior? How do we select collaborative interaction partners, and signal our quality as prospective partners? Why do we hate hypocrites? In 2013, Jillian graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University. Her research is funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Gordon Pennycook was a postdoctoral fellow in HCL from 2016-2018. He is now a tenured professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His research is generally focused on dual-process theories of reasoning and decision-making. He investigate the distinction between intuitive processes (“gut feelings”) and more deliberative (“analytic”) reasoning processes. He is principally interested in the causes (a) and consequences (b) of analytic thinking.

2017

Jonathan Schulz was a postdoctoral fellow in HCL from 2015-2017, having previously worked at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on cross-cultural differences in social norms and decision making. He has conducted experiments all around the globe, investigating societal differences in intrinsic honesty and cooperation. He is particularly interested in the permeability of societies' network structures and its effect on moral behavior. He is now a faculty member at George Mason University.

Christina Starmans studies adults' and children's reasoning about the self and personal identity. In the HCL, she was particularly interested in questions about how we view past and future versions of ourselves, and how our thoughts about future selves affect our planning and decision making for the future. In other work she investigated adults' and children's intuitions about what kinds of properties the self might have, as well as how we reason about conflict within the self (the proverbial angel & devil on the shoulders), and the moral implications of attributing a self to an entity. She is now a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.

Jeremy Cone was a post-doc in HCL from 2013-2015. He is now a tenured professor of Psychology at Williams College. His research aims to build a broad, inter-disciplinary understanding of how non-conscious processes function and how and when they result in
changes to implicit mental representations. In particular, he explores what kinds of information influence the formation of implicit evaluations, how quickly they can be changed, and what downstream consequences they have on actual behavior across a range of domains. To find Jeremy at his new home, check out http://cornellpsych.org/people/jcone/

Rimma Teper graduated from York University in Toronto, Canada with a B.A. in psychology and a B. Ed. She completed her Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Toronto. Her past research has focused on the role that affective experience plays in shaping moral behavior and moral forecasting. Currently, she is interested in the emotional and motivational underpinnings behind different types of prosocial behavior. Her research is guided by questions like: what types of emotions cause people to cooperate with others? To help those in need? How do these emotions differ from those that motivate people to refrain from cheating, lying or stealing? Rimma's research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Alex Peysakhovich was a post-doc in the HCL from 2013-2014. He is now a behavioral economist on the Core Data Science team at Facebook. He is interested in how to combine tools from machine learning with those of social and behavioral science to improve the outputs of both. In particular, he studies how individuals make decisions under uncertainty and learn about the world, why people help others and contribute to public goods even when they have nothing to gain, how culture and formal rules interact, how to design institutions taking into account human psychology, and how self-control works.