do children infer closer relationships from special social actions?

we reserve certain special actions for the people we are closest to: for example, we are willing to shake hands with many, but only hold hands with a few, and we can also expect that two people who are holding hands are likely to be in a closer relationship. in our research, we are interested in whether children use the rarity of a social action to infer who is in a close relationship.

with mack briscoe and ashley thomas at harvard university

do we offload empathic tasks to AI?

AI can serve as a novel case study of our rich intuitions about social features previously unique to human relationships, like providing empathy. this research asks if people perceive LLMs (like chatgpt) as capable of providing empathy or emotional support, will they behaviorally offload empathic responsibilities to AI more?

with madhulika shastry and kurt gray at ohio state university

can storytelling improve empathy in classrooms?

in collaboration with the practitioner group narrative 4, this research studied the efficacy of narrative 4 programs in increasing youth empathy, prosociality, and curiosity through storytelling exercises.

with emily kubin, narrative 4, and kurt gray at the university of oxford and ohio state university

how do children decide to share wealth with people they've never met?

a rich literature on children's resource distribution decisions has shown that children can account for luck, merit, and need when sharing resources. but how are children's sharing decisions affected by how they acquire their resources? our research examines whether children share differently with unknown others whether they gained wealth through inheritance, windfall, or work.

with sophie riddick and katherine mcauliffe at boston college

how do we pay attention to important sounds and tune out background noise?

an open question in auditory attention and suppression research is whether our ways of ignoring distractions rely on separate mental processes or the same attention system. this research created tasks that triggered different types of auditory suppression and directly compared them within-participants.

with heather daly and mark pitt at ohio state university