Elizabeth L
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at Yale University
Expertise
Any subfield in psychology
Bio
I am a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Yale University investigating how children and adults reason about social institutions. My research utilizes behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to test whether people intuitively separate institutional objects, roles, and actions from standard ones. Prior to Yale, I explored psychological research in a variety of subfields. At Dartmouth College, I studied behavioral neuroscience using rodent models, helped build brain templates for fMRI neuroimaging, and studied face perception disorders (if you search up prosopometamorphopsia, one of the first results that will come up is my face). At Tsinghua University, I investigated the ability of AI models in helping to diagnose depression in children. Across these domains, my academic passion revolves around mapping the cognitive and semantic structures that shape human social perception. Outside of research, I've tutored 60 students from nine countries in English, math, AP psychology, SAT, and ACT. I was involved for all four years of my undergrad at Dartmouth in the Women in Science Program, where I mentored six younger students with their independent research projects. By senior year, I advanced to Program Coordinator, made over 300 mentee-mentor matches, and paired 200 undergraduates with faculty labs. Apart from research and education, I enjoy dancing, cooking, video editing, and reading airplane incident investigations.Project ideas
Evaluating the Perception of Fairness
This proposed study explores whether adolescents and adults differ in how strictly they judge violations of arbitrary institutional rules, like school dress codes, compared to standard social norms. Using an online platform like Qualtrics, participants will read randomized vignettes about different rule-breaking scenarios and rate the violation's severity, the rule's legitimacy, and the rule-breaker's competence on a 1-to-7 scale. The resulting behavioral data can then be analyzed using foundational statistical tests—such as t-tests or ANOVAs in R or SPSS—to pinpoint any significant differences across age groups and conditions. This research will provide insight into the cognitive boundaries of human rule-following, revealing how developmental stages shape our deference to constructed institutional authority versus fundamental social norms.