Background

Alex is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Amanda Woodward and Alex Shaw. He graduated from Carleton College in 2019 with a B.A. in Psychology and English Literature and then completed a M.S. in Psychological Science at SUNY New Paltz in 2021. During and following his master's degree he was a research assistant for Harvard University's Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab and The Music Lab, helping to develop global databases of story and song to assess cross-cultural universals and variation in psychology. 

Research Interests

Alex is interested in how we acquire, understand, and create the unspoken rules and norms of social life. He is also interested in how relationships like friendship, kinship, and the caregiver-child bond create moral obligations, expectations, and tradeoffs between values that don't necessarily hold for interactions between strangers. Lately, he has been thinking about the nature of infants' social evaluations.