Jean Decety
Jean Decety (Ph.D. in Neuroscience-Medicine) is a Professor at the University of Chicago and the College, with a primary appointment in the Department of Psychology and a secondary appointment at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. He is the Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Decety’s research relies on integrating knowledge across multiple levels of analyses, the perspective that characterizes social neuroscience. He highly values teaching undergraduates as it motivates to think about the long road, and find meaningful links with other disciplines including evolutionary psychology, anthropology, economics, sociology and political science.
email: decety [AT] uchicago.edu
Abdulaziz Alhothi
Abdulaziz grew up in Qatar. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University with a minor in Mathematics. He is a MAPSS candidate seeking to examine the driving factors of how people perceive their own moral values and how empathy intervenes in moral decision-making. Coming from a rapidly developing country in terms of politics and religion, Abdulaziz is particularly interested in exploring the validity and reliability of various ways to measure moral decision-making in the context of Arab and Islamic societies.
email: a.alhothi [AT] gmail.com
Qiongwen (Jovie) Cao
Qiongwen (Jovie) received her B.A. in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Southern California, where she studied the effects of attribute salience on intertemporal choice. Jovie is a Ph.D. student in the Integrative Neuroscience program interested in morality and social decision-making. Specifically, she examines how social context and culture affect moral decisions and the valuations of human lives. Jovie’s work combines behavioral economics, eye-tracking, and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of moral decisions.
email: qiongwenc [AT] uchicago.edu
Jie Chen
Jie is a Ph.D. student in Computational Neuroscience. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Applied Psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara. Before joining UChicago’s PhD, Jie worked as a Lab Manager in Yu’s Emotion Science Lab at UC Santa Barbara studying value-based decision-making in various social contexts. She is interested in understanding the neural and computational mechanisms underlying moral values involved in decision-making. She is particularly interested in how moral conviction in medical practice.
email: jchen28 [AT] uchicago.edu
Michael Cohen
Michael Cohen earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA, and has had prior postdoctoral training at Northwestern University and University of Pennsylvania. Much of his prior work has used behavioral and fMRI methods to examine effects of conscious strategies and non-strategic effects of reward when people learn information of varying importance. In the SCNL, Michael uses fMRI, cognitive science methods and computational modeling to examine how moral convictions motivate political activism and political violence.
email: mscohen [AT] uchicago.edu
Elodie Corvaisier
Elodie is a doctoral student in Economics. She holds a Master in International Economy and Development from University Paris Dauphine. Elodie studies the impact of forced displacement on children’s social preferences in the Sahel region of Africa. She also examines the perceptions of harmful gender social norms among adolescents and their parents, specifically early forced child marriage and female genital mutilation in conjunction with the role of personal norms, normative beliefs, and empirical beliefs.
Email: corvaisier [AT] gate.cnrs.fr
Charlotte Dai
Charlotte is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Statistics at the University of Chicago. She earned her B.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Washington, Seattle. Charlotte examines the evolution of public attitudes toward assisted dying and euthanasia in the United States from 1920 to 2020. She uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques investigate the rapid shifts in public opinion and identify the key events or incidents that triggered these changes on attitudes toward assisted dying.
Email: dcar [AT] uchicago.edu
Joey Epstein
Joey is a MAPSS QMSA student at the University of Chicago, holding a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Global Security Studies from Johns Hopkins University. He is published in Clio’s Psyche and has participated in multiple psychology consortia. His current research focuses on formally modeling belief dynamics, particularly how tolerance for conflicting information influences both the likelihood of engagement and the extent of belief change when receptive.
email: jhe4 [AT] uchicago.edu
Andrew Koller
Andrew, a MAPSS student at the University of Chicago, earned a bachelor’s from DePaul University, double majoring in psychology and philosophy. As a research assistant in Dr. Graupmann’s social psychology lab and a student of Nietzsche under Dr. Kirkland, he developed a deep interest in how moral values and empathy affect decision-making in medicine. Andrew explores this topic within the context of medical doctors responding to patients requesting assisted dying. Beyond academia, he enjoys cooking, traveling, photography, coding, and machine learning.
email: koller [AT] uchicago.edu
Hannah Kreuziger
Hannah is a Ph.D. Student in Developmental and Cognitive Science. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and German Studies from Emory University in 2023. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, she served as Lab Manager for both the Emory Infant and Child Lab under Dr. Philippe Rochat and the Morality and Development Lab under Dr. Arber Tasimi. Hannah is interested in understanding the origins of moral attitudes toward life and death, as well as when and how the respect for individual autonomy contends with the respect for life within the scope of moral decision-making.
Joanna Li
Joanna received her B.A. from Georgetown University, where she studied Psychology and Biology under the mentorship of Dr. Abigail Marsh. Currently, she is a MAPSS student whose research centers on altruism, prosocial decision-making, and moral psychology. In particular, she is captivated by the mechanisms that drive compassion–especially to extraordinary degrees. She is a big fan of open science, Hank Green, and Jeopardy.
email: ll1123 [AT] uchicago.edu
Haocheng Ma
Haocheng was a MAPSS student at the University of Chicago and is now a research assistant at New York University. He received his B.S. in Engineering and Psychology from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He previously worked as a research assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He also studied at Osaka University and Hokkaido University in Japan. Haocheng is interested in developmental science, empathy, moral reasoning, and cognitive science. He enjoys scuba diving and swimming.
email: hm3135 [AT] nyu.edu
Undergraduate students
Ava Cho
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology
Sophie Feng
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Cognitive Science
Amelia Gibbs
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Cognitive Science and Economics
Aseem Gidwani
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Neuroscience
Hina Masuda-Singh
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology
Nishtha Sharma
Third year at the College
Majoring in Economics
Katie ODonnell
Fourth year at the College
Majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology
Emma Tung
Third year at the College
Majoring in Cognitive Science
Fun facts about us
Two-third of lab members have either lived or visited Hong Kong several times. Many of us have relatives and/or lived in Malaysia, Australia, China, Singapore, Sweden, Hong Kong, Israel, France, South Africa, United Kingdom and the US.
🇲🇾 🇦🇺 🇨🇳 🇸🇬 🇸🇪 🇭🇰 🇮🇱 🇫🇷 🇿🇦 🇬🇧 🇺🇸
English is obviously our lingua franca, but Arabic, Cantonese, German, Mandarin, Hindi, French, Hebrew and Urdu are also spoken.
Collaborations
Marie Claire Villeval 🇫🇷
Experimental and Behavioral Economics
CNRS-Lyon University, France
Winnifred Louis 🇦🇺
Social Psychology
University of Queensland, Australia
Yuan Chang Leong 🇺🇸
Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience
University of Chicago, United States
Fang Cui 🇨🇳
Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience
Shenzhen University, China
David Adam 🇨🇿
Department of Psychiatry
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
5848 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637