Welcome! We're a research group at the University of South Carolina. Our work asks how social structures shape beliefs about social categories and interactions within and between groups. We use lab and field experiments, survey methods, and agent-based models to study networks, organizations, and information environments as "treatments" that can have a lasting affect on how people think and interact -- even after their exposure.
Three key questions guide the work we do:
- How can changes to macro-level social environments influence downstream behavior?
- When and how do social environments cause durable changes to a person's cultural meanings?
- How might systematic changes in widely held personal views lead to macro-level social change?
Our research helps build knowledge about the relationship between social structure and personal beliefs of the people within them - an outcome relevant to both basic scientific research and organizational / social policy.