Research
How do our psychological mechanisms perform in and adapt to our hyper-socialized, hyper-accelerated modern world of social media, smartphones, and cultural digitization?
Social media platforms, digital culture companies, and government agencies are all worried about the role that online cultural conflict, political polarization, bias, and mental health play in trust, safety, society, and AI alignment.
I study the psychological and cultural mechanisms that underlie these issues of digital cultural conflict; attention bias to threat, intergroup dynamics, cross-cultural morality, intersectional prejudice, and hate-based rhetoric online.
Given my background in international conflicts and their interplay with technology and culture, my work explores how to leverage experimental data, anthropological research, and computational methods to measure, analyze, and combat threat and conflict both online and in the real world.
My research has been published in leading computer science, psychology, and interdisciplinary venues—including ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, Nature Human Behavior, American Psychologist, JEP: General, and PNAS Nexus—and supported by NSF, Google Jigsaw, Microsoft Reform Justice, and the Plurality Institute, with coverage in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other national media.
Moral Machines: Benchmark Datasets, Alignment, Evaluations
The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus - LREC, 2026
How do people speak about morality online and how does it relate to offline behavior? How does the moral language on Reddit differ from other social media platforms? How do we teach machine learning algorithms about moral values?
Our project aims to help answer these questions by providing the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 Reddit comments curated from 12 distinct subreddits and hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for eight categories of moral sentiment. The corpus is widely used to train and benchmark machine learning models and large language models on moral language understanding.
AI and Society
Perils and Opportunities in Using Large Language Models in Psychological Research - PNAS Nexus
Carelessly using LLMs in psychological studies, a trend we rhetorically refer to as ``GPTology,'' can have negative consequences, especially given the convenient access to models such as ChatGPT.
We elucidate the promises, limitations, and ethical considerations of using LLMs in psychological research including the substantial psychological diversity around the globe and within populations, narrowing down psychology's methodological toolbox with LLM annotation, and the need to develop both methods and standards to compensate for LLMs' opaque black-box nature to facilitate reproducibility, transparency, and robust inferences from AI generated data.
Subjective AI for the LAPD
The Subjectivity of Respect in Police Traffic Stops: Modeling Community Perspectives in Body-Worn Camera Footage - ACL 2026
Can AI learn that different people see the same interaction differently?
We introduce a large-scale dataset of police traffic stops annotated by community members, justice-system-impacted individuals, and law-enforcement-affiliated annotators. By modeling respect as a subjective rather than objective concept, we develop perspective-aware AI systems that better capture how trust, legitimacy, and respectful communication are perceived across communities.
Cultural Conflict Online and Across Cultures
Moral Alignment Shapes Responses to Misinformation -Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Does targeting audiences’ core values facilitate the spread of misinformation?
We analyze real-world Twitter data (N = 20,235; 809,414 tweets) on COVID vaccine misinformation, in conjunction with a set of behavioral experiments (N=1600), and find that aligning the moral framing with individuals' moral values increases the spread of misinformation. Framing posts to align with people's moral values led to higher intention to share, regardless of the accuracy of the content, suggesting that targeting core values can influence the dissemination of information on social media.
🏆 Research Awards and Recognitions 🏆
Occasionally, researchers leave the lab and complete triathlons. (right: Dr. Nina Christie USC)