As an experimental psychologist, my research seeks to understand the immense power and the surprising limitations of our minds in adaptively responding to new information given a lifetime of learning. I examine learning in the context of basic social processes. Specifically, I study the ordinary decisions we make every day that are critical to our well-being and even survival: our evaluations of and beliefs about other people. In doing so, I rely on a combination of traditional online and laboratory experiments as well as computational approaches, while drawing on a variety of learning paradigms, including reinforcement learning, evaluative conditioning, propositional learning, and causal learning. These methods help me uncover the basic mechanisms involved in how we acquire and update our impressions of individuals, especially against the backdrop of information about their social group memberships, such as gender, sexual orientation, age, race, and ethnicity.
I am currently a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Department of Psychology, working with Melissa Ferguson. I obtained my PhD in 2019 at the Harvard Psychology Department under the mentorship of Mahzarin Banaji, Fiery Cushman, and Sam Gershman and spent a year as a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Department of Psychology with Melissa Ferguson and Amy Krosch. My research has been funded by the Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship, the Harvard Graduate School Fund, the Harvard Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, the Stimson, Restricted, and Knox Funds at the Harvard Psychology Department, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. My work has been published in American Psychologist, Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, and other outlets. I am a member of Project Implicit’s Scientific Advisory Board and serve on the editorial boards of Psychological Bulletin, Social Cognition, and Social Psychological and Personality Science as well as on the emerging editors board at Personality and Social Psychology Review. I have extensive teaching experience in statistics, social cognition, and social psychology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I am a three-time recipient of the Derek Bok Center’s Harvard Distinction in Teaching Award.
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Psychology
Yale University
Sarah Ryan is an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is concentrating in psychology with a minor in economics. She is interested in social and developmental psychology. In the future, she would like to do social psychological research with a focus on education inequality interventions.
Catherine Kim is an undergraduate at Boston College majoring in Psychology. She is particularly curious about the ways in which language influences our thoughts and shapes the way we think about or perceive something. In the future, she hopes to do research on culture and its effects on human minds.
Ruolin Lu is an undergraduate at Boston College majoring in Psychology. She is interested in clinical and social psychology. In the future she would like to pursue a PhD in one of these fields.
Harrison Satcher is an undergraduate at Harvard University. He studies psychology, and has interests in statistics and computer science. In his free time he enjoys creative writing and weightlifting. In the future, he would like to work in academia.
Victor Yang is a sophomore at Harvard University studying computer science. He also has an interest in psychology and the biological sciences. Outside of the classroom, he is part of Harvard's Engineers Without Borders chapter and relaxes by going on his daily runs.
Ece Hakim is an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is concentrating in psychology and planning to pursue a secondary in art history or filmmaking. She is interested in social and developmental psychology. In her free time, she enjoys acting and drawing.
My submission "Evaluative statements are more effective than evaluative pairings in shifting implicit attitudes" (co-authored with my advisor Mahzarin Banaji) has been selected as a finalist for the 2016 Student Poster Award competition at the Annual Convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, to be held in San Diego, CA, in January.
I am looking for undergraduate research assistants starting in the Spring semester of the 2015/2016 academic year.
My work
In my main line of work, I am investigating how different kinds of learning (learning based on relationships that we experience in the environment vs. more abstract, language-based, learning) contribute to the formation of attitudes, especially relatively automatic and uncontrollable implicit attitudes, towards people and things. Online data collection for this project has been ongoing since January 2015 and is expected to continue throughout the academic year. In addition to my main line of work, I have secondary interests in quantitative methods and metacognition.
Your contribution
Hours are completely flexible but a weekly commitment of at least 10 hours is expected. I am looking for research assistants who are genuinely interested in empirical research and are willing to work hard in a fast-paced lab with high expectations in terms of quality. Research assistants could get involved with research design and idea development, background research and literature reviews, stimulus construction, study creation and coding, participant recruitment, and data collection (both online and in person). Programming experience (especially HTML, JavaScript, R, and Python) and/or prior experience involving psychological research are desirable but not necessary.
Compensation
Harvard undergraduates may work in the lab as volunteers, in exchange for course credit, or possibly in exchange for payment. Undergraduates from other universities may work in the lab as volunteers.
How to express interest
Interested students should send a cover letter (stating why and on which project you would like to work with me), an up-to-date CV/resume, and a short academic writing sample (of about 500 words) to kurdi@g.harvard.edu.
You can download my poster for SPSP 2016 comparing the effects of evaluative pairings and evaluative statements on implicit attitudes from here.
