Prayer as Problem-Solving


Updates coming soon--once I get my act together

Inferring and Inducing Concern for Online Personal Data Privacy 


Updates coming soon--once I get my act together

Uncertainty & Bias in Demographic Perception

People in countries around the world dramatically mis-estimate the size of demographic groups. Researchers have chalked this up to bias alone. However, explanations of this misestimation have largely ignored theoretical models of perception. We present a model which combines an understanding of the nature of human estimations with a conceptualization of uncertainty as well as bias. Paper under review. 

Check out the conference proceeding here!

Collaborator: David Landy

Scaling Uncertainty in Visual Perception and Estimation Tasks

This work follows up on the Uncertainty & Bias in Demographic Perception work, by testing our assumptions that people hedge their estimates under uncertainty in the manner we propose. (*Spoiler alert*: It looks like they do!) 

Check out the preprint here and the javascript code for the neat online experiment on GitHub.

Collaborator: David Landy

Surprise in Narratives

When people retell stories, what guides their retelling? Most previous research on story retelling and story comprehension has focused on information accuracy as the key measure of stability in transmission. This paper suggests that there is a second, affective, dimension that provides stability for retellings, namely the audience affect of surprise. 

Check out the paper here!

Collaborators: Fritz Breithaupt (et al. with the Experimental Humanities Lab at IU)

Energy Perception

How do people think about energy? Energy is an interesting subject of cognitive scientific study because it is so hard to think about! It's invisible and its units are difficult to understand (what is a kilowatt hour anyway?), but people use energy daily and often need to think about their usage. This project investigates which features of household appliances people use as proxies in their energy estimates. 

Check out the paper here!

Collaborators: David Landy, Tyler Marghetis, Shahzeen Attari, Deidra Miniard