In Summer 2017, the Social Lab moved from Watson to Wall! It took a while to get settled in our new space, but it started to feel like home by the end of the summer. Lots of people were in and out of the lab during the summer, which made for an exciting mix of projects.

Kim Bourne (Colby College ’16) joined the lab as Lab Manager. Originally from Minnesota, Kim went to college in Maine and then worked as a lab manager at NYU; moving to North Carolina was a cultural (and climate) adjustment. She oversees all NSF grant-related research in the lab and coordinates the research assistants.

Foivos Isakoglou ’20 won an Abernethy Grant to study how empathy and compassion influenced individuals responses to social media-like stories of Syrian refugees. Dr. Kristi Multhaup and I co-supervised the project. This was an especially fun project to work on given the way it crossed boundaries between cognitive and social psych, as well as communication studies.

My Doan ’19 was an honorary member of the Social Lab, though she primarily worked with Dr. Tabitha Peck in Computer Science. My’s project applied a well-researched social psych phenomenon called Stereotype Threat to a virtual reality environment. My not only assisted with coding the VR environment, but also collected data from more than 60 participants.

Maya Barr ’20 volunteered in the lab while also doing an internship at Crown Cab in Charlotte. Originally from Charlotte, Maya is doing her undergraduate work at Harvard University. Her interest in English paid off, as we tasked her with writing several different types of experimental materials.