Lab Retreat 2022
Top (Left to Right): Michael Barlev, Megan Mulhinch, Annabel Dang, Brooke Donner, Michael McCullough, Thomas McCauley
Bottom (Left to Right): Leo Kleiman-Lynch, Shirley Liu
Lab Members
Graduate Students
Megan Mulhinch received a B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and a M.A. in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. She conducts research on topics like cooperation and prosocial behavior, charitable giving, social evaluation (and its effects on prosociality), and religious cognition. Through her research, she aims to provide insight into how the human mind operates and how we can leverage these insights to encourage human cooperation and altruism.
Megan also manages the day-to-day operation of the lab, including our undergraduate research assistants. Interested undergraduates should email her about opportunities for getting involved in the lab (mmulhinch@ucsd.edu).
Thomas McCauley graduated with a B.S. in psychology from the University of Delaware in 2014, and an M.A. in experimental psychology from the College of William & Mary in 2017. He joined the lab in fall of 2017, while it was located at the University of Miami, with the aim of pursuing questions pertaining to the evolved psychological mechanisms underlying cooperation, punishment, emotion, and morality. His goal is to understand how these mechanisms interact with enduring ecological features by identifying points of variance and invariance in their function across diverse societies. He is also interested in statistics, experimental methodology, reproducibility in psychological science, and meta-science.
Carson Koffler graduated with a B.S. in psychology and linguistics from Tulane University in 2024. While in undergrad, he conducted research with the Evolutionary Social Cognition Lab (with Dr. Damien Murray) and the Stigma Action Research Lab (with Dr. Kristin Kosyluk), working on projects spanning attraction, virtue signaling, and mental health stigma. Broadly, he is interested in applying evolutionary frameworks to understand moral judgements and emotions.
Zeve Marcus holds a B.A. in psychology and M.A. in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. His background includes work in sensation and perception, behavioral neuroscience, and social cognition. He joined the lab with the goal of better understanding the attentional mechanisms involved in prosocial decision making. Zeve is also interested in statistical programming, analytics, psychometrics, educational psychology, and narratives in science.
Research Coordinator
Brooke Donner began working in the lab after graduating from the University of Florida with a B.S. in psychology in 2018. She moved with the lab from the University of Miami to the University of California, San Diego in 2019 and continues to manage several large research projects and the daily goings-on of the lab. She is also working toward her Montessori early childhood teaching credential.
Research Affiliates
Shuai Shao received a B.S. in psychology from Beijing Normal University in 2017, and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2018. His goal is to study social cognition and decision-making from developmental, evolutionary, and cross-cultural perspectives. Specifically, his current research focuses on children’s and adults’ (1) moral reasoning (e.g., prosocial lies) and (2) economic decisions (e.g., resource allocations).