People
Director
Paul Piff
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine.
His primary interests are in how social hierarchy, economic inequality and social class, and social emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Email | CV | Google Scholar
Graduate Students & Postdoctoral Scholars
Matthew I. Billet
is a postdoc who studies how culture shapes our perceptions of the social and natural world, and what implications that might have for collective action on global issues, like climate change. He received his Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Mertcan Güngör
is a Ph.D. candidate who studies how people respond to moral disagreements with others (eg. loved ones, strangers, public figures, etc.) and how to mitigate the downstream consequences of moralization, such as intolerance, animosity, and distrust. He received his M.A. in Psychology from Boğaziçi University, Turkey.
Rudy Medina
is a Ph.D. candidate who studies how family values and feelings of social support help young adults persist in the face of challenges. He studies how encouragement from family and close others can motivate young adults to stick with long-term goals. He is ultimately interested in how these everyday experiences shape people’s beliefs about upward mobility and career opportunities.
Jennifer Barajas
is a Ph.D. candidate who studies the mechanisms by which environmental injustices (eg. discrimination, pollutants) affect physical and mental health. Her dissertation focuses on vicarious racial discrimination (ie. second hand exposure to prejudice or racism)—its frequency in both everyday and digital spaces—and its implications for health across a wide range of racial groups. She received her M.A. in Psychological Science from UC Irvine.
Anais S. Geronimo Jimenez
is a Ph.D. student who studies the consequences of inequality by examining the moral underpinnings of sociopolitical behaviors and attitudes, as well as the various mechanisms that lead to the justification and maintenance of inequality. She aims to shed light on how we can enhance intergroup social relationships and foster communities of care.
Ishita Singhal
is a Ph.D. candidate who studies how large societal problems—like economic inequality and climate change—play out in everyday life, influencing well-being and work. Her work looks at the difficult trade-offs people face amidst the demands of daily life: choosing between career advancement and health, weighing individual merit against structural advantage, or balancing moral goals with self-interest.
Hojeong Lee
is a Ph.D. student whose research interests broadly span prosociality, ecology, and natural language processing. Ultimately, Hojeong seeks to understand how perceptions of surrounding environments shape values, using diverse methods such as experiments, archival data analysis, and computational text analysis. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Sogang University and M.A. in Cultural and Social Psychology from Korea University.
Justin Mikell
is a Ph.D. student whose primary research interests are in how people conceptualize different biases (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and how that influences their perceptions of others and support for anti-discrimination policies (eg. DEI). He aims to contribute to our understanding of how biases develop with the goal of identifying avenues for targeted interventions/policies that reduce social biases.
Christian Beltran
is a Ph.D. student who studies the causes and consequences of moralized political conflict. He examines how people infer their opponents' minds (eg. their motives, goals, feelings, etc.), how such inferences worsen political division, and what this means for reducing divides. He also examine show group identity and ideology shape what information we believe to be true, as well as how to leverage psychological insights to help facilitate more productive and cooperative engagement across the political aisle.
Olivia Lizarraga
is a post-baccalaureate student who studies how politics and cognitive rigidity contribute to intergroup conflict and prejudice. Through future research, she hopes to promote the well-being of marginalized groups and promote empathy across groups. She received her B.A. in Psychology from California State University, Bakersfield.
Lab Alumni
Hyunjin Koo '23, Assistant Professor, CSU San Marcos
Jared Celniker '22, Academic Program Analyst and Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Irvine
Sean Goldy '22, Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University
Andrew Gregory '21, Consumer Insights Analyst at Nike
Angela Robinson ‘20, Postdoctoral Researcher at the UCI Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation