I am a PhD Candidate in Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

My research examines how differences in performance and social position affect self-perception and interpersonal judgments.

Job Market Paper

Treating Transparently Random Events as Predictable:  Rare, random events happen all the time. The odds of winning a national lottery are exceedingly small, but nevertheless given the number of people playing, someone is eventually bound to win. Observational data and simulation studies suggest that luck plays a role in determining consequential outcomes in many domains, especially among the most successful performers. Yet there is little experimental evidence showing how lucky success affects the beliefs and subsequent behavior of individuals who experience it.

In this research, I examine how people respond to real, randomly determined performance outcomes. My paradigm uses a simple, quintessentially random task––predicting the outcomes of five fair coin flips––as evidence of how performance systematically affects people’s beliefs and behaviors, even when that performance is totally and transparently determined by chance. Analyzing the prediction performance of over 12,000 participants, flipping both virtual and real coins, I find that increasing success leads people to be more optimistic about future performance, to take bigger risks, and to shift their performance attributions from luck to skill.

This work demonstrates that even in a domain where outcomes are totally and transparently randomly determined, people’s beliefs and behavior are sensitive to past performance. This has implications for how we evaluate and reward performance in organizations, and suggests that merely identifying the role that luck plays in consequential domains may not be enough to eliminate its effect on forecasts of future performance.

Publications

“Perceived Power Polarizes Moral Evaluations” (2024) Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: People tend to view others with similar beliefs as more moral than others whose beliefs differ from their own. In this project, I show that target power amplifies this effect such that more powerful like-minded people are viewed as more moral than their less powerful counterparts, but the opposite is true for people perceived to have different beliefs. I trace this pattern across 34 years’ worth of favorability ratings of politicians in the American National Elections Survey (ANES), and correlational studies of individual judgments of groups and individuals, and demonstrate through two incentive-compatible experiments that these judgments are rooted in people’s expectations of how others will affect them.

”The Psychology of Asymmetric Zero-Sum Beliefs” (2022) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Zero-sum beliefs are the perception that one party’s gains are necessarily offset by another party’s losses. Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, I find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one’s expense, but not vice versa. Across several domains (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies), I find that people are more prone to believe that others’ successes come at their expense than they are to believe that their own successes come at others’ expense. This effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others’ success—reassuring people about their own strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.

Education

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
MA, Psychology, The New School for Social Research
MS, Education, Hunter College, CUNY
BA, Philosophy, College of Wooster, Ohio

Teaching

Managing in Organizations
Managerial Decision Making
Strategies and Processes of Negotiations
Power and Influence in Organizations