PsyPhi Lab
I co-direct the Psychology and Philosophy Lab (PsyPhi Lab) with Matt Lindauer. Our interdisciplinary lab fosters crosstalk and collaboration across psychology and philosophy, especially concerning morality, norms, politics, and art. If you’d like to know more about our lab, please email us.
Applying to the lab
I admit doctoral students as part of the Basic and Applied Social Psychology training area in Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am accepting applications for Fall 2025.
Graduate Students
Grace Flores-Robles, doctoral student
Grace Flores-Robles is a PhD candidate in psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Quantitative Reasoning Fellow at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She completed her B.S. in Psychology with minors in Biology and Statistics at The University of Texas, El Paso. Broadly, her research examines how morality shapes the decisions people make within the workplace, especially as they relate to low pay in feminized labor and blame for wrongdoing.
Alix Alto, doctoral student
Alix is a graduate student in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She earned her B.S. in Psychology at Northeastern University. Broadly, her research investigates identity, political/economic ideology, imagination, and social categorization. Her current work primarily deals with the psychology of leftism and radical imagination. In particular, she's interested in exploring topics such as: how radical imagination and possibility beliefs influence participation in leftist politics, how leftist identities cohere around (anti-)capitalist values, how moral values are conceptualized across the left-leaning political spectrum, and whether mental representation explains how people form political attitudes toward multiply marginalized groups.
CV - Email
Nicolette Dakin, doctoral student
Nicolette M. Dakin is a Ph.D. student in Basic and Applied Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She earned her B.A. in Psychology at SUNY Purchase and her Master of Social Work at NYU. Her research interests are focused on the area of political psychology, including perceptions of the legitimacy of the status quo, conspiracy theories, and the relationship between social identity, psychological needs, and ideology.
Connie Chiu, doctoral student
Connie Chiu is a Ph.D. student in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She completed her Bachelor of Social Sciences in Psychology with minors in Counseling at The University of Hong Kong. Broadly, her research focuses on biases in moral and political cognition. She is especially interested in how various contextual and dispositional factors affect people’s moral and political judgments. Previously, she has investigated this in the context of political misinformation and COVID-19 conspiracy theories in both China and the U.S. Currently, she is working with Dr. Gantman to investigate how cultural norms affect causal judgments and other contextual factors that affect how people think about rules and laws.
CV - Email
Xander MacSwan, doctoral student affiliate
Xander MacSwan is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy program and Cognitive Science affiliation at The CUNY Graduate Center. He earned his B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Davis and has a professional background teaching classes in humanistic psychology and nonviolent ethics in state prisons. His research is at the intersection of two broad areas: cognitive science and philosophical logic. Xander is particularly interested in questions to do with the logical structure of cognition in domains of social and moral reasoning, as well as more fundamental questions to do with formal models of belief.
Casey Hall, doctoral student affiliate
Casey is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and Senior Bioethics Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His primary research focuses on clarifying the moral significance of hypocrisy as well as its function in interpersonal address. This includes topics such as: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for hypocrisy?; Is being hypocritical a distinct moral wrong?; and, What is the nature of the ‘standing’ to blame that hypocrites are commonly said to lack?
Lab Alumni
Jordan Wylie (PhD student, now Assistant Professor at Cornell University)
Tomasz Zyglewicz (PhD affiliate, now Harper-Schmidt Fellow at University of Chicago)
Matthew Vanaman (PhD student, now postdoc at UT Austin)
Kyle Anderson (PhD affiliate)
Ryan Tracy (PhD affiliate, now Data Scientist at Vizio)
Scott Koenig (PhD affiliate, now Research Associate at Action Research)
Nirupika Sharma (lab manager, now PhD student at UC Berkeley)
Angelina Vasquez (MA affiliate, now PhD student at The New School)
Masters students: Isadora Permil, Ana-Louise Franz
Undergraduate honors students: Levi Satter, Fehim Hoti, Ariel Abramova, Agampreet Singh, Esther Mathew, Savanna Benzur, Makesha Balkaran, Aliza Shilman, Farheen Khan, Samantha Chabot, Yulia Pyatetsky, Celia Florea, Sharon Santhosh, Julia Glatman, Rachel Musheyev, Michael Koslov, Fehim Hoti, Jonathan Lum, Ankita Sharma, Fizza Nayyab,
Undergraduate researchers: Emma Joing, Nicole Sergeyev, Marwa Islam, Daniella Davidowitz, Emily Coatl, James Gordon, Samantha Chabot, Sharifa Thompson, Jessica Betancourt, Z Longo, Damoon Parsa, Aicha Scylla, Sydney Greta Gdanski,
Collaborators
Paul Bloom (professor of psychology, university of toronto)
William Brady (assistant professor of management & organizations, northwestern)
Wil Cunningham (professor of psychology, university of toronto)
Ajua Duker (assistant professor, new york university)
Peter Gollwitzer (professor of psychology, new york university)
Seth Green (researcher-writer)
Matthew Lindauer (assistant professor of philosophy, brooklyn college & CUNY grad center)
Kyle Matthewson (associate professor, university of alberta)
Peter Mende-Siedlecki (associate professor, university of delaware)
Kaitlyn Milless (researcher, mathematica)
Gabriele Oettingen (professor of psychology, new york university)
Betsy Levy Paluck (professor of psychology, princeton university)
John-Henry Pezzuto (doctoral student, ucsd)
Roni Porat (senior lecturer, hebrew university)
John Sciarappo (behavioral scientist)
Jordan Starck (assistant professor, stanford university)
Jay Van Bavel (professor of psychology, new york university)
Daniel Yudkin (senior adviser, more in common)