Hello! I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Institution for Social and Political Policy and Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University. I received a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin. I’m interested in how information—about the living conditions of other people, about policy—changes people’s satisfaction with the status quo and what they want from the government. To do this, I have focused my research on what makes problems appear serious. I study how key characteristics of politically relevant problems, such as whom they affect, their apparent causes, and how widespread they are, shape how serious they are perceived to be. Using survey experiments and panel data, I have looked at a host of problems (including opioid addiction, rent burden, internet insecurity, teen suicide, job loss, and others) in order to understand the psychological dynamics underlying problem perception in the mass public. We know information matters. I want to know what information matters and why!
Studying how people process information about social problems has, perhaps unsurprisingly, led me to study social identity. I have examined how people’s social identities, such as rural and partisan identity, shape their perceptions of social problems. Experiments I designed have shown people care less about problems befalling out-group members, rather than caring more about problems afflicting members of their own in-group. However, I’ve also shown that people exhibit an in-group forgiveness bias: people withhold support for government aid to members of groups when they’re responsible for their trouble, but they don’t similarly “punish” in-group members. Working with colleagues in psychology, I have helped usher the theory of identity fusion into political science, especially in helping explain support for authoritarian actions and belief in misinformation among supporters of former President Trump.
Other work I am doing touches on how information influences Members of Congress, particularly through experiences provided through privately sponsored (aka “gift”) travel. Some work I have done is methodological, including a paper on how generalizable survey experiments are to people who refuse to take surveys.
When not yearning to understand the psychology of political reasoning, I enjoy a hike on a cool day and a movie. Before graduate school, and after graduating college with a degree in film, I lived in Sintra, Portugal, where I worked as a substitute teacher for two years. I was still working on some short films at that time, one of which won Best Micro Film (< 5 minutes) at a festival. Someday I hope to make another, maybe between 5 and 10 minutes long this time.
