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.) Developing a theory of socioeconomic conditions as a more meaningful target of study than socioeconomic status; 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.) Developing a construct that describes people’s appreciation, embrace of, and preference for social difference in their environments; b.) Examining how the 2008 Great Recession impacted the class identity of Americans; 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.) Understanding the role of Conscientiousness in the gender gap in college graduation in the U.S.

Future directions we are interested in include, but are not limited to: a.) Understanding the psychological processes underlying the formation of individuals’ class identity; b.) Developing ways of making individuals more open to social difference in the long-run; c.) Studying how changes in socioeconomic conditions predict, or are predicted by, changes in the personality traits of both individuals and their romantic partners; d.) 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 e.) Examining the role of historical processes in personality and person–environment transactions. 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.