2020-Present: Graduate research assistant at McKenzie Lab, UCSD La Jolla, CA
My current research mainly centers on decision-making and self-control.
• I am designing studies to measure how individualism and collectivism influence how policy makers set default options: do they set default options based on what they think is best, or do they set default options based on what most people think is best?
• Why do we have conflicts between what we prefer (first-order preferences) and what we prefer to prefer (second-order preferences)? I proposed a psychological account of why this conflict arises, suggested potential cognitive mechanisms that underlie this conflict, and linked this conflict to self-control behaviors. Read more!
• Should we prefer 80%-lean beef to 20%-fat beef? I developped measures to study whether people see framing effects–responding differently to different descriptions of the same thing–as mistakes or not. This research has potential implications for framing effects in medical and commercial settings. Read more!
• I helped design a study that tested the correlation between psychologists’ perceived quality of their publications and the number of citations that these publications
actually have.
• I am collaborating with professors Michael McCullough (UCSD) and Moshe Hoffman (Harvard University) to propose an evolutionary reasons account of why people proselytize, and we are designing potential experiments to test out our hypotheses.
• I collaborated with Alice Diaz (University of Edinburgh), and used personality datasets to predict life outcomes such as well-being.
Nudges are changes in one’s choice environment that influence behaviors. Nudges are typically implemented by others, and have been shown to be very successful (e.g., many countries have sucessfully nudged people to donate organs by setting organ donation as the default policy). What if we don’t want to be nudged by others? Can we successfully nudge ourselves? I found preliminary evidence that self-nudges–nudges implemented by oneself on oneself–are more effective than traditional nudges in facilitating self-control. Read more!
2020-2021: Graduate researcher at University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK
I made use of a cross-cultural large personality dataset to compare the link between perceived control and well-being across cultures (this work is supervised by my advisor René Mõttus). I found that agentic control (taking action to change the environment) predicts well-being better in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures at the country level, but adaptive control (adapting to the environment) predicts well-being better in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures at the individual level.
2019: Grantee for Rosen Travel Grant Pomona College Claremont, CA
During my study abroad in France, I interviewed French strikers about their sense of conformity and group identity. I then conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses on how culture, conformity, and group identity motivate French and American strikers differently.
2017: Psychology research Intern at Mend Santa Monica, CA
Mend is an app that helps its users recover from relationship breakups through blogs and audio trainings. I conducted research on people’s psychological process when healing from a relationship breakup, and transformed my research into blogs, offering users behavioral advice to recover from relationship breakups.
2017: Research Assistant at Neural and Cultural Lab Pomona College Claremont, CA
I tested people’s reaction to social norm violations in different cultures.