Emily Gerdin (emily.gerdin@yale.edu)

I’m a rising 6th year graduate student in the lab, broadly interested in the development of group
cognition. This semester, I will be working on two projects: The first is about whether children
infer that people who expend more effort on behalf of a group are more committed groupmates;
the second is about how children evaluate people who immigrate to or from the United States.

I will start our work together by assigning you a few papers for to read to get a sense of my research program, and I will also share with you more about my expectations. At the start of each week, I will check in with you about the tasks I have for you for that week, and then my expectation is that you will check in with me at the end of the week to update me on your progress on the tasks I've assigned. It is important to me that you feel comfortable asking for my help with/feedback on anything - whether it be a task I've assigned you, figuring out your own interests in psychology, reading your resume/CV, writing letters of recommendation for future positions (I’ve written many, many of these), etc. etc. I can be as much of a resource as you would like! In turn, my expectation of you is careful, conscientious work and regularly checking in about progress.

Sifana Sohail (sifana.sohail@yale.edu)

I’m a third-year Ph.D. student working in Yarrow’s lab. My research interests broadly have to do with how children—and adults—understand fairness and inequality. Specifically, I’m interested in exploring how we decide what fair is: for example, when splitting a cookie, do we just want to split the cookie in half or are there other considerations (like hunger, who deserves the cookie more, where the cookie comes from, existing rules of cookie splitting to name a few) that determine what we think is fair. My work examines these socio-cognitive factors that affect our understanding of fairness and inequality, most recently in light of specific economic concepts. I'm always happy to provide more details about ongoing studies if you'd like to know more!

I enjoy working very closely with my mentees both on our projects and their in-lab work, as well as in discussions about their research interests and career goals. As a third-year student, I'm fairly available but this fluctuates throughout the semester. This means my best relationships tend to be with RAs who want to work closely with a grad student, but are also able to work independently once they understand our next steps. I'm happy to mentor both students who already have specific research ideas and students who are still figuring it out and just want experience and exposure! From my end, I’d love to mentor someone who is communicative about their expectations and goals (even if they’re not super concrete at the moment), and quick to let me know if something comes up.

Pinar Aldan (pinar.aldan@yale.edu)

This summer, I will be mainly working on three different projects that all focus on how children and adults interpret and make sense of social-economic inequalities. The first project examines how people explain why some individuals have more money than others and what kind of inferences they draw from observed inequalities. The second project explores whether children and adults think that the new generation of a social group should be held responsible for harm caused by their ancestors to another social group to gain economic benefits in the past. The third project centers on children and adults' opinions on inheritance and whether people should be entitled to the resources acquired via their family. Each project includes multiple adult and child experiments. While data collection is ongoing for some experiments, others are still in the design stage. Additionally, I plan to design a new experiment over the summer to explore whether children and adults have differing views on just compensation based on job types (e.g., whether children also believe that white-collar jobs should receive more compensation than blue-collar jobs). The particulars and the timeline for this project are currently to be determined.

My primary expectation for RAs working with me is that they are interested in the projects and motivated to learn about the literature and methods we use. RA tasks may involve literature searches, stimuli and experiment creation, coding, qualitative analysis, and data collection. Although familiarity with R and experience with Qualtrics might be helpful, prior experience is not required. I am also planning to upload a study on Lookit, so experience with that would be extremely valuable, but it is not a prerequisite.As a mentor, I am flexible and understand that each undergraduate has varying levels of research expertise. For RAs new to research, I typically start them with small tasks and provide a lot of feedback until they become more comfortable in the lab. At the outset, I also assign them a few papers to read so that they can gain background knowledge on the projects' subject matter. As RAs gain more experience, I encourage them to be more involved in the ideation and experiment design. In addition, once we begin working together, I encourage my RAs to think strategically about their learning goals so that we can develop a plan together. I typically prefer to have a weekly meeting with RAs at the beginning of the week to review the upcoming tasks. At the end of the week, I request that the RAs give me a rundown of their work so that I can prepare for the following week.

 

Aaron Baker (aaron.baker@yale.edu)

I’m a 2nd year PhD student working with Yarrow on our mental representations of institutions. Currently, my work is investigating how children and adults represent institutional roles, and how these representations differ from a theory of mind. In other words, do we explain the behavior of someone occupying an institutional role in terms of their mental states, or do we think about features of the institution instead? Over the summer, with the help of our new interns, I will be testing this question with a couple developmental studies. In addition, I will be thinking more about the broader idea of institutional reasoning, including developing ideas for computational models of these representations. (Should they be thought of as graphs? Or perhaps agent models?)

This summer, I will be working closely with one intern to develop these projects and collect child data that can be compared to adult studies. Most importantly, this will involve learning the protocol and facilitating data collection. In addition, we will work together to examine pilot data and develop new iterations of the experiments when necessary. This can involve creating stimuli, building Qualtrics surveys, and conducting preliminary data visualizations and analyses. This is, of course, a learning experience and I’m looking forward to stewarding an interested intern through this research process and the necessary skills that accompany it. Also, I would be excited to have broader conversations about this work and explore any areas that are particularly interesting to you!