Research

In my work, I aim to study the role of individual differences in willingness to exert mental effort on higher-level cognition, in both basic and applied contexts. Why is it that some people enjoy thinking deeply while others find the deployment of mental effort to be “painful”? In a more basic line of research, I aim to use cognitive neuroscience techniques and physiological data to examine how anxiety and subjective pain are related to the exertion of mental effort. I also hope to study how aversion to cognition develops across the lifespan, for example, by examining how other cognitive abilities, such as working memory capacity, relate to willingness to exert effort, as well as the role of one’s environment in shaping their thinking dispositions. In my applied research, I study the consequences of failing to engage in critical thinking, often in the context of scientific reasoning. I develop interventions, often involving graphical depictions of data, to teach people about scientific, mathematical, and statistical concepts to improve their scientific reasoning and consequential decision-making.