Paid Summer Internship (Non-Yale Students)

We are currently looking to recruit 4-6 highly motivated undergraduates or recent graduates with a serious interest in future study in psychology to work as research assistants this summer.

Main Duties and Responsibilities: Summer interns will support the lab’s work through a variety of tasks including conducting studies with children and adults over Zoom and/or offsite, participant recruitment and scheduling, study design, experiment facilitation, data management and/or entry, video coding, and more. Interns must commit to being in-person at Yale University for the entire duration of the program. Internship duties will include some data collection on weekends.

Time Commitment: Our internship program requires a commitment of eight full-time weeks to be completed between June 3rd and August 2nd, 2024. Note that preference may be given based on schedule fit and flexibility, and some weekend hours are required.

Funding: All interns will receive a $5,000 stipend.

Application Materials: Please prepare the following materials to complete the application form: 1) résumé/CV; 2) an unofficial academic transcript; 3) the name of one recommender (ideally, faculty) that may be contacted for a reference. All applications received by March 22nd, 2024, will be given full consideration. Apply through this link: https://forms.gle/ahR9jx6aQhwUX3aJ7

Prospective PhD Students

I am likely to accept a student during the 2024-2025 application cycle. I would also be open to working with or co-advising a student admitted to work primarily with another faculty member, so applicants in that position may want to reach out.

My central interest these days is in the psychological understanding of social reality, and in particular of social artifacts like money, identification cards, licenses, as well as social roles such as judges, presidents, and officiants. All these entities have genuine and objective causal powers, but their powers are not reducible to intrinsic properties of the objects or people, rendering them somewhat mysterious. Children seem to take a while to grasp the causal structure of these things—why? And what actually underlies their cultural stability? Papers with former graduate student Alexander Noyes, available on the publications page, can give you more of a flavor of what we’re up to here, but newer directions include how we create casually efficacious social kinds and social institutions, whether these things are better thought of as acts of collective intentionality versus as patterns of coordinated and incentivized social behavior, and how we might think and act differently depending on whether we think of of someone as an individual, a social “kind”, or an occupier of a social role. These topics intersect closely with work on normativity and conventionality, as well as questions of how people infer social structure from sparse interactions. I expect to engage with them through conceptual analysis, human behavioral experiments, and computational modeling.

All that said, the lab still works on a variety of topics relating to more classic intergroup phenomena, including issues relating to cooperation, fairness, implicit and explicit attitudes, and social coordination, so if you have keen interests in these areas you might still be a competitive applicant, especially if you can identify another Yale faculty member you are also interested in working with.

Thanks for your interest! More information including details of how to apply is available at the Psychology Department Graduate Program.

Semester Research Assistants (Yale Undergraduates)

Yale undergraduates can work as research assistants in the Social Cognitive Development Lab. Undergraduates first volunteer in the lab for one semester and then may work for course credit. Positions are 6-10 hours per week, and applicants should be comfortable interacting with children ages 3-12 as well as parents in person (if applicable), as well as over email, the phone, and Zoom.

Responsibilities activities may include:

  • Calling and scheduling families to visit our lab

  • Facilitating and running child participants in our lab

  • Attending weekly lab meetings

  • Assisting in stimuli design

  • Entering and analyzing data

To learn more about or apply for a position, please send your resume to the SCD Lab manager Rui Zhang at rui.zhang.rz378@yale.edu.