I’m a PhD student in psychology at the University of Southern California. For my PhD work, I plan to use computational modeling techniques (like neural networking and coherence-based modeling) to model systems in social psychology. These could be systems at the individual level – social perception and attitudes – or involve some form of group modeling as well. I hope to focus on moral psychology – the science examining how moral judgments are made – as well as how moral psychology relates to the political decisions, behavior, and allegiances that people tend to form in contemporary society.
This blog takes the approach that understanding our individual psychology properly is essential for understanding how we can live together well. Many people take this approach in their personal lives. In this blog, I am to show what we learn from science about our psychology tells us about how we ‘live together well’ in a public sense – in our economy, in our democracy, and our society. That’s how this blog gets its name – here you will read about how we can take what we know about how we perceive ourselves and each other, and apply it to help design a better public sphere.
Topics will undoubtedly draw inspiration from my research, as well as the work of other social psychology researchers, but will have a broader focus in psychology while aiming to apply psychological principles in economics, society, public policy and politics; particularly in current issues. I’ll mainly focus on the United States and New Zealand contexts, since I am most familiar with those.
Thanks to Andrew Wilson for his assistance in naming this blog. The image in the header was taken from NASA’s website, following a link from this tumblr account. It’s an image of a city, presumably time-lapsed, taken at night from the International Space Station. As the tumblr says, it looks a lot like a fluorescence microscopy neuron image, with a neuron visible and a network of dendrites extending out to the left. The image nicely represents how our psychology at the most basic level shapes our society even at the largest levels.
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