Our Approach to Research
We study the psychology underlying how societies answer two critical questions: 1.) Who gets resources? and 2.) Who is part of “us”? We approach these questions using a framework of mutual constitution: with one eye toward how social environments push people into particular life paths and another toward how people create their own lives. That is, we investigate these questions by asking how people locate themselves within and create the larger social environments that they occupy throughout their lives and, in turn, are shaped and selected by these social environments throughout their lives.
We aim to produce research projects that a.) uncover the psychology underlying how people’s lives unfold, b.) address important social concerns, and c.) are theoretically and methodologically rigorous. An ideal research project for us is one that prompts us to reflect upon our own lives and the ways that they have been shaped by our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; other people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and by social forces larger than us. An ideal research project for us also changes how we think about our current social practices. We aim to train students and post-docs to confidently develop their own lines of research that meet the above criteria and to be comfortable using a variety of analytic techniques to conduct these research projects.
Methodologically, we use a variety of techniques with the goal of using analytic techniques that are most appropriate for the research question at hand. Analytic tools we have used in the past include: laboratory and online experiments, coordinated data analyses, longitudinal panel studies, psychometric measurement development, natural experiments and interrupted time series, age–period–cohort modeling, Bayesian modeling, social network analysis, and qualitative literature reviews. We view these techniques as tools for answering our research questions and that can expand our awareness of the kinds of phenomena that we can study. We do our best to stay up-to-date on the latest developments for these techniques and to continue learning new techniques.
Our Past, Present, and Future Research Projects
Past projects on our core research questions have included: a.) Examining how the 2008 Great Recession impacted the class identity of Americans; b.) Examining how income shapes people’s conceptions and evaluations of their future selves; c.) Studying how being curious vs. being compassionate predicts having friendships with people of a different-race; and d.) Uncovering differences in the meeting places, roles, and evaluations of different-race and same-race individuals in people’s personal social networks.
Current projects include: a.) Understanding how macroeconomic expansions and contractions shape people’s well-being; b.) Studying the development of generalized prejudice across adulthood; c) Uncovering how the Big Five personality traits predict socioeconomic conditions in the domains of skills, labor, income, capital, and culture during both economic expansions and economic recessions; and d.) Investigating how people form and develop their class identity both individually and across adulthood.
Future directions we are interested in include, but are not limited to: a.) Examining the role of historical and macroeconomic processes in personality and person–environment transactions; b.) Developing ways of making individuals more open to social difference in the long-run; c.) Examining the effect of life events on cross-race and cross-ethnic contact; d.) Studying how changes in socioeconomic conditions predict, or are predicted by, changes in the personality traits of both individuals and their romantic partners; e.) Creating a best-practices inventory of measures of socioeconomic conditions in the U.S. in the domains of skills, labor, income, capital, and culture; and f.) Understanding the psychological processes underlying the formation of individuals’ class identity. Most importantly, our future directions are guided by new members of the laboratory, who bring their own interests, knowledge, and experiences to our community and thereby enrich our understanding of the human mind.