Lab Members
Alex Shaw, Ph.D.
DIBS Lab Principal Investigator, Professor of Psychology
Broadly, Alex is interested in how human beings navigate the complex social world by tracking each others’ reputations and by signaling to others. More specifically, he studies the development of fairness in children. His fairness research is focused on differentiating fairness from other forms of niceness, exploring the reputational motives that may underlie fairness, and how fairness may relate to our alliance psychology. He also researches intellectual property in children and is investigating whether part of our concern with people stealing ideas is based in not liking others garnering a false reputational advantage. He is also interested in the computations people perform to decide how and when to fight over resources, track others’ reputations, and learn to properly discount others’ self-promotional strategies.
Email: ashaw1@uchicago.edu
Isabella Ramkissoon
Lab Manager
Isabella is a current fourth year at the University of Chicago majoring in Psychology and minoring in Religious Studies. She oversees the lab’s research projects and facilitates the work of our graduate and undergraduate researchers. Within the CECR, she unites the Development of Social Cognition (DSC) Lab and the Developmental Investigations of Behavior and Strategy (DIBS) Lab led by Professor Alex Shaw. She is interested in studying how children develop early sociopolitical worldviews and how children reason about wealth inequality.
Email: iramkissoon@uchicago.edu
Molly C. Gibian, M.A.
Senior Research Associate
Molly advises for the lab’s research agenda, integrates systemic project management, writes regulatory documents and provides organizational guidance. She has over 10 years of research experience in developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and education from her roles at M.I.T., Harvard Medical School, Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University. Her interests focus on societal/cultural influences on learning cognition, education environments, leadership and social language.
Email: mgibian@uchicago.edu
Graduate Students
Ben Morris
Ph.D. Student
Ben is a PhD student working with Alex Shaw. Broadly, Ben is interested in how children rely on and exploit social reasoning in conversational contexts. To become smooth conversationalists, young children must extract social information from language to understand and learn about people, and also recruit social information to understand and learn language. In much of my work, I explore how children infer social meaning not from what someone says, but from how (and especially how quickly) they say it.
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Mitchell Landers
Ph.D. Student
Mitchell received his B.A. in philosophy from UC Berkeley. As a post-baccalaureate, he received training in evolutionary psychology from Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Steve Gaulin at UCSB. Mitchell is currently interested in friendship, cooperation, and alliance formation, the function of social emotions, and how to reconcile personality and other individual differences with our evolved, universal human nature.
Email: msblanders@uchicago.edu
Katie Vasquez
Ph.D. Student
Katie is a PhD student working with Alex Shaw. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2020 with a high honors in Psychology. After graduating, Katie worked as Yarrow Dunham’s and Paul Bloom’s laboratory manager at the Yale University Social Cognitive Development and Mind and Development Labs. Katie broadly researches children's social and moral development, including children's moral intuitions and how children behave in socio-moral dilemmas. In the DIBS Lab, Katie plans to focus on how children think about and engage in social strategies, such as reputation management.
Email: kvasquez@uchicago.edu
Website: https://ktvasquez.weebly.com/
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Alex Mackiel
Ph.D. Student
Alex is a PhD student with Alex Shaw and Amanda Woodward. In general, Alex studies social and moral cognition from infancy to adulthood. He is especially interested in how people in varying stages of development perceive, understand, and reason about different types of social relationships and the norms, expectations, and obligations that they entail.
Email: amackiel@uchicago.edu
Research Assistants
Emma Tung
Research Assistant with Ben Morris
Emma is a second-year majoring in psychology and business economics. She is interested in studying adolescent psychology, specifically adolescent decision making and neurodevelopmental disorders. She has worked in previous labs focusing on social gestures as well as civic engagement. She is excited to learn more about social relationships as well among adolescents.
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Bentzion Fiorino
Research Assistant with Ben Morris and Alex Mackiel
Bentzion is a third-year psychology major at the college. He is interested in studying cognitive and behavioral psychology, particularly focusing on decision-making, memory, judgments, and cognitive biases. Previously, he worked in a decision-making lab focused on bilingualism. Bentzion is thrilled at the opportunity to study social judgments with children and gain a glimpse into the innate judgments that they form through social interactions.
Xander Deanhardt
Research Assistant with Katie Vasquez
Xander is a 3rd year at the college studying Psychology and Data Science. He is interested in how children view themselves, and how their self perception and self-esteem affects the actions they take. Motivation is often studied solely in the context of education, so Xander is interested in studying motivation in other contexts, such as making new friends or trying new activities. Outside of the DIBs lab, Xander is the community outreach team leader for UChicago’s Environmental Research Group, an executive board member in AKPsi, and a seasoned pancake maker.
Lab Alumni
Anam Barakzai, Ph.D.
In DIBS Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2019)
Post DIBS Lab: Working at Google in UX
Jessica Bregant, J.D., Ph.D.
In DIBS Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2018)
Post DIBS Lab: Assistant Professor Houston Law Center
Zoe Liberman, Ph.D.
In DIBS Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2016)
Post DIBS Lab: Assistant Professor, UCSB
Ike Silver. Ph. D
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant
Post DIBS Lab: Assistant Professor of Marketing, Northwestern
Emily Gerdin
In DIBS Lab: Lab Manager
Post DIBS Lab: Ph.D. Student, Yale University, Psychology
Kayla Good
In DIBS Lab: Lab Manager
Post DIBS Lab: Ph.D. Student at Stanford University
Zachariah Berry, M.A.
In DIBS Lab: Was a MAPSS Student
Post DIBS Lab: Ph.D. Student at Cornell University, Marketing
Sean Zheng, M.A
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant and MAPSS student
Post DIBS Lab: Ph.D. Student, Northwestern University, Psychology
Sophie Arnold
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant
Post DIBS Lab: Lab Manager for Yarrow Dunham, Yale University
Abbie Klein
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant
Post DIBS Lab: Research Specialist with Seth Pollack, UW Madison
James Dunlea
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant
Post DIBS Lab: Ph.D. Student at Columbia University, Psychology
Emory Kim
In DIBS Lab: Research Assistant/Junior Lab Manager
Post DIBS Lab: Lab Manager for Franklin Huang Lab, UCSF
Gemma Smith
In DIBS Lab: Lab Manager
Post DIBS Lab: Fulbright Scholar; English Teaching Assistantship in Argentina
Hannah Hok
In DIBS Lab: Graduate Student (Ph.D., 2023)
Post DIBS Lab: UX Research at Amtrak's Innovation Team | Research Fellow at AR/VR Studio, Harvard Innovation Labs.