Team
Ashwini Ashokkumar
Ashwini is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at NYU and the director of the WE-search Lab. Before coming to NYU, Ashwini was a postdoctoral fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University and received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ashwini's work broadly asks how social and political identities help (or harm) the realization of democratic ideals. Her recent work has studied technologically mediated environments to illuminate how identity processes impact political deliberation and discussion, and social cohesion in the digital age. Ashwini was recently part of the team that built the newly launched text analysis program, LIWC-22. Check it out!
Outside of lab, Ashwini likes to hang out at coffee shops, listen to podcasts, and wander around new cities.
Lin Gan
Lin is the lab manager for the WE-search Lab. She graduated from Georgetown University with a BSFS in International Political Economy.
Lin is broadly interested in how we coordinate with one another, and the myriad of ways coordination can go wrong. She is particularly interested in how the rules we make facilitate or hinder our coordination.
Lin likes to read second-hand books, listen to Bach at Noon, watch birds, and play tennis.
Ke (Kay) Fang
Kay is a master's student at NYU Gallatin. His research aims to understand how complex social dynamics like online extremism, normative shifts, and collective action emerge from individual-level cognitive factors.
Kay is especially interested in enhancing social psychology by integrating rigorous experiments with multilevel and computational perspectives such as micro-level computational cognition paired with macro-level network science, agent-based modeling, and Natural Language Processing.
Kay drinks hot coffee all year round: pour-over single origin coffee for enjoyment and coffee with milk to stay awake.
Yi Hung
Yi is a current master’s student at NYU GSAS interested in understanding how our social identity influences how we talk and think about justice and morality, and in turn how that is manifested through our actions and our politics.
Interests outside of the lab include the piano, crossword puzzles, and loose-leaf tea.
Nura McCormick
Nura is an undergraduate student at NYU College of Arts and Science. She is studying Psychology and Creative Writing, and she hopes to eventually earn her PhD in Social Psychology.
In terms of research, Nura is interested in various aspects of social psychology including prosocial behavior, motivation, and the psychology of women. She is especially interested in how prosocial behavior impacts and is impacted by one's sense of identity.
In her free time, Nura loves reading fantasy novels, listening to music while taking walks around the city, and making herself a tasty cup of Egyptian tea.