Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Social Psychology

Research interests include psychology of the Black experience, substance abuse and nonverbal behavior among people of African descent, and HIV/AIDS

The lab is interested in how people set and reach goals. Much of the lab research has focused on self-control, particularly how people set and reach goals that they set for themselves. The lab is especially interested in factors that may contribute to the breakdown of self-control.

The Gaesser Lab investigates the social functions of—and cognitive mechanisms underlying—imagination, memory, and future thinking. We are particularly interested in elucidating how imagining the future and remembering the past can facilitate social decision-making and economic behavior directed at benefiting the welfare of others using a variety of methods, including online crowdsourcing, lab-based behavioral testing, and neurostimulation. In doing so, an aim of our lab is to apply these behavioral and brain findings to better understand and motivate everyday moral behavior (e.g., charitable donations).

Research interests include emotion and judgment, media and music psychology

The Social Identity & Justice Lab examines how prejudice, stigmatization, and other group-based biases develop and persist. We study the psychological processes associated with social identity, intergroup behavior and decision-making, moral judgment, and belief systems that serve to maintain system-level social injustice and inequality. We explore these processes from diverse conceptual and methodological perspectives, including basic social cognition, experimental philosophy, political psychology, and social-cognitive development.