Join our research team! 

I may take a student during the 2025-2026 application cycle. I would also be open to working with or co-advising a student admitted to work primarily with another faculty member, so applicants in that position may want to reach out to both potential advisors.

My central interest these days is in the psychological understanding of social reality and how social interaction can be understood via an analysis of social institutions, which I understand as complex interlocking sets of social roles and their governing norms. More specifically, recent work has focused on social artifacts like money, identification cards, and borders, as well as social roles such as judges, presidents, and officiants and their attendant powers to affect change in the world. All these entities have genuine and objective causal powers, but their powers are not reducible to intrinsic properties of the objects or people, rendering them somewhat mysterious. Children seem to take a while to grasp the causal structure of these things—why? And what actually underlies their cultural stability? Papers with former graduate student Alexander Noyes, available on the publications page, can give you more of a flavor of what we’re up to here, but newer directions include: how we create casually efficacious social kinds and social institutions; whether these things are better thought of as acts of collective intentionality versus as patterns of coordinated and incentivized social behavior; how we might think and act differently depending on whether we think of of someone as an individual, a social “kind”, or an occupier of a social role; how reasoning in this way relates to and is distinct from mentalizing; and how these institutional structures intersect with systems of power that can both constrain and enable social change. These topics all intersect with work on normativity and conventionality, as well as questions of how people infer social structure from sparse interactions and how power and hierarchy affects our lives. I expect to engage with them through conceptual analysis, human behavioral experiments, and computational modeling. A recent (long!) paper discussing these topics, co-authored with my colleague and collaborator Julian Jara-Ettinger, is available here.

All that said, the lab still works on a variety of topics relating to more classic intergroup phenomena, including issues relating to cooperation, fairness, implicit and explicit attitudes, and social coordination, so if you have keen interests in these areas you might still be a competitive applicant, especially if you can identify another Yale faculty member you are also interested in working with.

Thanks for your interest! More information including details of how to apply is available at the Psychology Department Graduate Program.

Thank you for your interest! We are currently not accepting new Research Assistants for the Spring 2026 semester. Please check this page in August for updates on if we will be recruiting for Fall 2026. For questions and inquiries, please email Alina Dau, alina.dau@yale.edu.

We are looking to recruit highly motivated undergraduates or recent graduates with a serious interest in future study in psychology to work as research assistants for summer 2026.

Main Duties and Responsibilities: Summer interns will support the lab’s work through a variety of tasks including conducting studies with children and adults over Zoom and/or offsite, participant recruitment and scheduling, study design, experiment facilitation, data management and/or entry, video coding, and more. Interns must commit to being in-person at Yale University for the entire duration of the program. Internship duties will include some data collection on weekends.

Time Commitment: Our internship program requires a commitment of eight full-time weeks to be completed between June 1, 2026 and August 1, 2026. Expected time commitment is 40 hours per week. Note that preference may be given based on schedule fit and flexibility, and some weekend hours are required.

Funding: Funding is available to provide successful applicants with a stipend of up to $5,000 to cover costs associated with participating in the internship. However, students are strongly encouraged to seek funding from their home institution and/or outside organizations. We will provide assistance for students seeking funding, including providing documentation and descriptions of our internship, as well as reviewing materials. Yale undergraduates must apply to Yale funding opportunities, including the Yale College Dean’s Research Fellowship, Rosenfeld Science Scholars Program, and Summer Experience Award, if eligible.

Application Materials: Please prepare the following materials to complete the application form: 1) résumé/CV; 2) an unofficial academic transcript; 3) cover letter; and 4) the name of one recommender (ideally, faculty) that may be contacted for a reference. All applications received by February 15, 2026 by 11:59pm EST will be given full consideration. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to support applications for visas for international students. Apply through this link: https://yalesurvey.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0pu645r3jhSzvjo

For questions and inquiries, please email the lab manager, alina.dau@yale.edu.