My research focuses on how children interact with, learn from, and evaluate the people in their environment. Specifically, I examine the effect of social cognition on the development, production, and maintenance of trust and prosocial behaviour. The long-term goal of my research program is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the effect of trust on human behaviour and development through the utilization of methods and theory from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology.
Work in my lab can broadly be divided into three related lines examining:
how children extend trust to others through the production of prosocial behaviours,
the development of children's ability to respond to other's displays of trustworthiness through selective social interactions
individual difference factors that affect the tendency to extend trust
