Social Psychology Graduate Students

Suhaib is a PhD student working with Prof. Dehghani in the Morality and Language Lab. Before joining the Lab, he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Energy and Process Engineering from the Berlin Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s in Psychology from Free University Berlin in Germany. His research interests focus on grounding natural language processing in psychological theory and applying it to problems in social psychology and social science. His main interest lies in understanding how morality and values manifest in language and how these insights can help us understand the dynamics of bias, prejudice and hate in different contexts, such as inter-group dynamics, perception of inequality and more.

Contact Suhaib at sabdurah@usc.edu

Ian Anderson (he/they) is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate working under Dr. Wendy Wood. His current research interests include how psychological and interpersonal processes are influenced by social media, technological design, and human-computer interactions. In particular, his work examines habits, misinformation, hate speech, and how the designs of social media platforms influence user behavior through reward-learning processes. His methodological approaches involve experimental design, archival data analysis, web scraping, text analysis, qualitative methods, linear models, and choice models.

Contact Ian at iaanders@usc.edu

Pragya Arya (they/she) is a third-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Norbert Schwarz. Their research broadly focuses on how contextual factors, mixed feelings, and metacognitive experiences guide judgement and decision-making, particularly beliefs about truth and perceptions of socio-political issues such as sexual harassment.

Contact Pragya at parya@usc.edu

Begüm is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Elisa Baek at the Social Connection Lab. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Statistics from Barnard College. She then worked as a lab manager for Dr. Leor Hackel and Dr. Wendy Wood’s labs at USC, where she focused on how individuals learn from social rejection and acceptance using computational neuroimaging. Her current work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of social (dis)connections and loneliness, using neuroimaging techniques and behavioral experiments — specifically, what distinguishes people who can establish social connections easily from others who can’t and what contributes to loneliness and social disconnections across individuals.

Contact Begüm at babur@usc.edu

Jenna Blyler is a first-year doctoral student studying environmental risk perceptions, advised by Dr. Joe Árvai. Her interest in environmental risk extends to various contexts such as health and safety, technology, and warfare. The influence of subtleties such as linguistic choices, numerical frames, and the interplay of power and trust on risky decision-making particularly intrigues her. Jenna has both a bachelor’s degree in psychology, political science, and criminal justice and a Master’s in Public Policy from Jacksonville University, where her research included topics such as polarization and extremism, conspiratorial thinking, and health risk perceptions. Before coming to USC, Jenna spent several years as a writer in higher education.

Contact Jenna at blyler@usc.edu

Alysia (she/her) is a sixth-year PhD candidate in social psychology working with Dr. Daphna Oyserman. Alysia graduated from the University of California, Riverside in 2018 with her B.S. in Psychology. Her current research focuses on how people’s identity-based interpretations of difficulty shape downstream behavior in a variety of domains, including academics and pro-environmental action. She employs a variety of methodological approaches including surveys, experimental studies, meta-analyses, and field studies throughout her work.

Contact Alysia at burbidge@usc.edu

Kevin is a second year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Daphna Oyserman. His current research explores (1) how our subjective experience of time influences motivation and behavior, and (2) how we perceive the self as beings in time, extending from the past to the future, and its downstream consequences on behavior.

Contact Kevin at choisuyo@usc.edu

Yema is a third year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Stephe Read and Dr. Lynn Miller. Prior to studying at USC, she worked on outreach initiatives that sought to understand and address climate vulnerability, advance public health, and promote community resilience. Her current research interests are centered on better understanding how individuals make decisions relating to climate change and sustainability at both an individual and policy level.

Contact Yema at yconteh@usc.edu

Yalda is a Ph.D. student in Social Psychology working with Dr. Morteza Dehghani at the Morality and Language (MOLA) Lab. She received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in psychology from the University of Tehran. Most of her work centers on how moral values and cultural forces shape our judgment and decision-making on large and minor scales. More specifically, she is interested in how endorsing some moral beliefs can lead to violence, prejudice, and discrimination. Contact

Yalda at daryani@usc.edu

Drew is a PhD student in social psychology working with Dr. Norbert Schwarz. His current research interests include how situational factors influence our judgment and decision making and how we use our feelings as information to guide our judgments. His work examines these processes in the domain of humor, in particular, how feelings of ease or difficulty (as a result of stimulus, presentation, context, or person-level characteristics) influence peoples’ humor appreciation of jokes, common misconceptions about humor (e.g., the effects of time of day and bustling crowds on peoples’ humor appreciation), and humor production (e.g., AI vs. human performance).

Contact Drew at gorenz@usc.edu

Ony is a 1st year PhD student working with Daphna Oyserman. He is interested in how people make sense of information which may threaten their sense of self and motivation. He received his BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Contact Ony at onyulhaq@usc.edu

Kira Harris (she/her) is a PhD student in social psychology working with Dr. Leor Hackel.  She is broadly interested in why and how people make decisions to interact with some individuals over others. Her current research includes exploring the role of gossip in memory and understanding rewards and costs in social interaction.

Contact Kira at kiraharr@usc.edu

Josh is a first-year social psychology PhD student working with Joe Árvai and Wändi Bruine de Bruin. His research program concerns how people make decisions in climate change / sustainability contexts. Josh completed his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University, and prior to USC, worked in education (in Fukuoka, Japan) and strategy consulting (in Chicago).

Contact Josh at inwald@usc.edu

Amabel Jeon is a second-year Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Southern California, working with Dr. Daphna Oyserman. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University in 2019, where she conducted independent research on the role of social group membership on memory formation under Dr. Kyungmi Kim. Amabel’s current research interests broadly focus on applying a cognitive frame to understand culture, particularly in bias and decision-making.

Contact Amabel at youngbin@usc.edu

Farzan is a Ph.D. student in social psychology working with Dr. Morteza Dehghani. He mixes computational methods with behavioral experiments to examine socio-psychological effects and their ecological manifestations in real-world behaviors. His current research focuses on how cross-cultural differences in collective nostalgia can shape moral cognition.

Contact Farzan at karimima@usc.edu

Chang Lu is a first-year Ph.D. student in social psychology with Dr. Elisa Baek. Her research interests revolve around social connections, particularly dyadic interaction and conversation. She received her BA from UC Irvine.

Contact Chang at clu81945@usc.edu

Jean is a first year PhD student in social psychology working with Dr. Leor Hackel. She is interested in using a reward learning framework to study interpersonal closeness and impression formation. She received her BA in Neuroscience from Princeton University, where she conducted research with Dr. Susan Fiske on the role of social reward in stereotype maintenance.

Contact Jean at jeanluo@usc.edu

Alice Qiao is a third-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Stephen Read. She studies motivation and decision-making in everyday social contexts. Her current research focuses on legal judgment, Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer effect, and fear of peer rejection.

Contact Alice at aqiao@usc.edu

Jackson is a Ph.D. student in the Morality and Language Lab at USC,  studying the moral psychology of conflict utilizing both novel machine learning tools and behavioral experiments. His work explores how individual and group moral beliefs and behaviors shape cultural conflicts and in turn how these conflicts shape our moral beliefs and behaviors. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Religious Studies from Cal State Northridge, his master’s degree in Cognitive Anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast, and has conducted field research on cultural conflicts in Israel, Armenia, Eastern Europe, and the U.K. Most recently, his research focuses on the moral language on online networks and the role it plays in our cultural polarization via both on and offline behavior.

Contact Jackson at jptrager@usc.edu

Yi Zhang is a first year Ph.D. student in social psychology working with Dr. Leor Hackel. He received his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from NYU. Yi’s current research interests include moral cognition, emotion, and social learning in the context of social networks.

Contact Yi at yzhang51@usc.edu

Avisha is a Ph.D. student in Social Psychology working with Prof. Stephen Read. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. She is interested in the neuroscience of emotions and social perception, focusing specifically on understanding the heterogeneity within these behaviors and experiences.

Contact Avisha at avisha@usc.edu