I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton University. I am interested in the cognitive processes that allow people to make it through what can seem to be an irreducibly complex world.

I have taught courses on how behavioral research can lead to the design of more effective public policies, and to normatively better decisions in everyday life.

My own work primarily focuses on how people ground complex or abstract ideas in vivid and concrete terms. Often we describe abstract ideas in metaphorical terms. For example, things that are important are heavy ("the burdens of responsibility") and artifacts that are complex seem alive ("the compuer is thinking"). In my work I show that these phrases are more than linguistic convenience, and reflect the way that we implicitly represent objects in the world around us. Moreoever, these metaphors matter for how people think and feel about the world around them.

In other research I am interested in how speed cues influence how we think about the world around us. To the extent that they convey a sense of urgency, they may lead to relatively superficial processing of information. I show, for example, that watching fast paced videos can lead to increased risk taking, and walking quickly lead people to focus on the superficial details of events, describing them in less abstract terms.

Finally, I am also interested in research methods. In particular, how crowdsourcing websites like Mechanical Turk can be used to democratize science, and the pitfalls that researchers must avoid when using this resource.