I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Berkeley I received a B.A. from Carleton College, a Ph.D from NYU, and taught at Cornell.
Much of my current research uses formal models and experiments to explore the causes and political consequences of biased beliefs. This work provides some ways to model motivated reasoning (wanting to believe certain things are true), selection neglect (not understanding the biases in observed information), and making simplifying assumptions. Both in this line of work and more generally I study topics like authoritarian politics, communication, information manipulation, discrimination, criminal justice, and conflict.
Another (often overlapping) strand of work focuses on measuring democracy and democratic change.
Recently I was part of an effort to create a Formal Theory section at APSA, and served as the first president of the section. See the section website for information about how to join, our virtual workshop, teaching materials, and more.