Welcome to the Behavioural Science (BS) Lab!
Below is a list of the fine people who work in the lab, who used to work in the lab, or who work adjacent to the lab.
I am recruiting a graduate student in the upcoming year (2027). If you’re curious about our grad program at Cornell, please visit https://psychology.cornell.edu/graduate-admissions-requirements for more information. Please feel free to send me an email outlining your research interests. Note that, for equity reasons, I don’t interview students prior to the application deadline. Having said that, feel free to let me know if you’re planning on applying!
Postdoctoral fellows
Hause Lin studies how people make decisions and likes to find answers to research (and life) questions by using ideas, theories, and data from different sources. He enjoys applying all sorts of models to rich datasets to gain insights into how people think and behave. He is a Twitter ad guru.
Esther Boissin focuses on the characterization of intuitive processes involved in the resolution of reasoning problems.
Graduate students
Christie Newton is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Regina. She completed her MSc of Organizational Studies at the Levene School of Business. Her research focuses on assessing analytic thinking and understanding how it relates to other behaviour like susceptibility to believing or sharing fake news. She is also interested in information avoidance, particularly politicized contexts.
Jabin Binnendyk is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His research interests stem out of a desire to understand why polarization and self-censorship occur and interventions aimed at alleviating them. This includes areas like partisan bias, discerning/ reducing the effects of “fake news”, and false polarization. In an era of conflict and communication breakdown, how can we bridge these divides?
Daniel Martin is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He is interested in understanding how our intuitions (fast thinking) interact with our analytical capacity (slow thinking). More broadly, his research interests stem from a desire to understand and foster rationality.
Celia Guillard is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. She researches the neural and psychological mechanisms that contribute intergroup conflict, specifically in the form of political violence. She is interested in understanding factors that can facilitate harm towards outgroup members and how to minimize division.
Lab Alumni
Nina Wang was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab from 2022-2025. She uses techniques from Natural Language Processing to study issues in moral and political psychology. She is also interested in leveraging AI technology to test psychological theories. She is now an Assistant Professor at York University (Glendon).
Philipp von Sicherer completed a Master of Arts degree at Cornell in 2024-2025. His research focused on testing interventions that would help people identify greenwashing in advertising.
Thomas Costello was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab from 2022-2024. He studies where political and social beliefs come from, how they differ from person to person–and, ultimately, why they change–using AI and the tools of personality, cognitive, clinical, and political science. He is now an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.
Puneet Bhargava was a research assistant in the lab from 2022-2023. He is now a graduate student at UPenn.
Chelsea Russill was an honours student in the lab in 2022-2023. Her thesis was co-supervised with Jabin Binnendyk and it investigated the role overconfidence and trust in experts in health-related decisions.
Katie MacDonald was an honours student in the lab in 2021-2022. Her thesis, co-supervised with Christie Newton, was on whether debunking works on TikTok. (Answer: sort of)
Peace Dukuye was an honours student in the lab in 2020-2021. Her thesis, co-supervised with Shadi Beshai, was on the roles of both protective and risk factors for mental health and their (lack of) association with the ability to distinguish between true and false news content about COVID-19.
Jonathon McPhetres was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab from 2019-2020. His research focuses on things such as why people reject science (and some great work specifically on GMO’s) and believe in misinformation. He is also very interested in physiological processes that relate to emotions and the chemical processes associated with reasoning. Jonathon is now an Assistant Professor at Durham University.
Sydney Brogden was a honours student in the lab in 2019-2020. Her research looked into whether source information impacts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit.
Eddye Kirk was an honours student in the lab in 2019-2020. Her researched was on whether the illusion of explanatory depth can be used to trigger people to detect fake news.
Shae Sackman was a research assistant in the lab in 2019-2020. Shae is interested in too many things to list, but the intersections of subjective experience and perception and how that interacts with social systems and institutions are a favourite. They are currently working on their Philosophy honours thesis on Hume, personal identity and Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Shehla Ahmad was a co-op research assistant in the summer of 2020. She helped track down fake news for the lab! Shehla is a Masters in Human Resource Management student at the University of Regina.
Mentors, friends of the lab, & current collaborators
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT Sloan. Dave was my postdoctoral advisor at Yale and we have since formed a longstanding research team.
Jonathan Fugelsang is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. Jon was my PhD co-supervisor.
Derek Koehler is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. Derek was my PhD co-supervisor.
Valerie Thompson is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. Val was my honours supervisor in undergrad. She taught me how to do science.
James Allen Cheyne is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo (now fully retired). He retains a spot on my website because he is the most interesting person in the world.
Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT.
Antonio Alonso Arechar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at CIDE.
Mohsen Mosleh is an Associate Professor of Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Brian Guay is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at SUNY Stony Brook.
Michael Nicholas Stagnaro is a Research Scientist at MIT.
Cameron Martel is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Jennifer Allen is an Assistant Professor at NYU Stern in the Technology, Operations, and Statistics Department.
Samantha Phillips is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University
Nat Rabb is a Technical Associate at MIT.
Kellin Pelrine is an AI Scientist and member of Technical Staff at FAR.AI
Nathaniel Barr is a Professor of Creativity and Creative Thinking at Sheridan College.
Wim De Neys is the CNRS Research Director at the University of Paris.
Lisa Fazio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University.
Grant Wilson is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the Hill and Levene Schools of Business, University of Regina.
Gordon Pennycook 