About
I work with Patrick Grim in the Computational Social Philosophy Lab. We use simple computational and analytic models to uncover the dynamics and plausibility of prominent conjectures in social epistemology, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. We've written papers on issues such as trust, polarization, and scientific experimentation.
On the more traditional political theoretic end, my work seeks to inform democratic theory and political epistemology more broadly by drawing upon empirical results and formal methods in political science. My dissertation, entitled Affective Trust and the Role of Social Norms in Constructing Faith in Others, asks what role conventions and institutions and social norms play in creating trust. There is plenty of work already on how institutions condition our expectations by shaping the incentives of others or people’s default levels of trust. Not enough attention has been paid to affective conditioning of institutions on trust though, which is unfortunate given the amount of research it has elicited in the fields of psychology and philosophy. I build theory using formal modeling techniques and then demonstrate the plausibility of my account in talking to Christian missionaries who work in the developing world. In so doing I come to better understand how they trust those to whom they preach, given the informational deficits of the missionaries.
