Ana Gantman, lab director
Ana Gantman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center. She completed her PhD in Social Psychology at New York University and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs. Dr. Gantman’s lab investigates how moral psychology affects how we see, think, act, and interact within institutions. Research in the Gantman Lab aims to test basic questions about the nature of morality that are directly relevant to public life and policy, using methods that range from cognitive and neural science to randomized field experiments. Dr. Gantman recently received the SAGE Young Scholars Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and was named an APS Rising Star.
Contact: ana.gantman@brooklyn.cuny.edu;
Grace Flores-Robles, doctoral student
Grace Flores-Robles is a PhD student in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She completed her B.S. in Psychology with minors in Biology and Statistics at The University of Texas at El Paso. Broadly, her research focuses on the factors that make people see systemic injustice. She investigates this in several contexts, including workplace hierarchies, gender schemas, and labor organizing.
Contact: gfloresrobles@gradcenter.cuny.edu
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.
Contact: agetreu@gradcenter.cuny.edu
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 Counselling 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. tever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Contact: pchiu@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Kyle Anderson, doctoral student affiliate
Kyle is a doctoral student in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology doctoral program. His research focuses on how different types of gratitude can affect political and racial attitudes, the antecedents and differences in liberal and progressive ideologies, political polarization, and issues facing different minority groups. In particular, he is interested in how to effectively reduce perceptions of interpersonal and intergroup threat, to better understand when societies might become more egalitarian over time.
Contact: kanderson1@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Ryan Tracy, doctoral student affiliate
Ryan is a doctoral student in the BASP program at CUNY, mainly researching impression formation and face perception. In the Gantman lab, Ryan studies how morality alters the threshold for face perception and how moral behavior distorts how a person's face is perceived. Additionally, he also explores cognitive mechanisms related to the reception of pseudoprofound bullshit.
Contact: rtracy1@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Annalisa Myer, doctoral student affiliate
Annalisa Myer is a graduate student in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and Political Science with a minor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, NY. Broadly, her research focuses on interracial interactions, intersectionality, and perceptions of Biracial people. She is interested in pursuing questions such as: How do people respond to increasing racial diversity in the U.S. and how does broader systemic injustice such as racial residential segregation limit contact between people of different racial groups?
Contact: amyer@gradcenter.cuny.edu
lab alumni
Matthew Vanaman (former phd student, now postdoc at UT Austin)
Jordan Wylie (former phd student, now postdoc at Boston College)
Scott Koenig (former phd affiliate)
Nirupika Sharma (former lab manager, now phd student at UC Berkeley)
Angelina Vasquez (former masters affiliate, now phd student at the New School)
Isidora Petmil (former masters student)
Ana-Louise Franz (former masters student)
Undergraduate honors: 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
Undergraduate research assistants Nicole Sergeyev, Marwa Islam, Daniella Davidowitz, Emily Coatl, James Gordon, Samantha Chabot, Sharifa Thompson, Jessica Betancourt, Z Longo, Damoon Parsa, Aicha Scylla
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 (postdoctoral researcher, new york university)
Peter Gollwitzer (professor of psychology, new york university)
Seth Green (researcher-writer)
Elizabeth Long (doctoral student, university of toronto)
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 Levi Paluck (professor of psychology, princeton university)
John-Henry Pezzuto (doctoral student, ucsd)
Roni Porat (senior lecturer, hebrew university)
John Sciarappo (behavioral scientist)
Jordan Starck (provostial fellow, stanford university)
Jay Van Bavel (associate professor of psychology, new york university)
Daniel Yudkin (visiting scholar, university of pennsylvania)