Katherine McAuliffe
Principal Investigator
Katherine McAuliffe is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston College, where she directs the Cooperation Lab and co-directs the Boston College Virtue Project. Her past work has focused on how children across societies acquire and enforce norms of cooperation, with a particular focus on children’s emerging understanding of fairness. More recently, she has begun to study the psychology of virtue from a developmental and cross-cultural perspective, specifically investigating the mechanisms that promote honesty, fairness, forgiveness, and trustworthiness in children and adults. She complements these lines of work with a comparative approach, examining how nonhuman animals solve cooperative dilemmas. She received a BSc in Marine Biology from Dalhousie University, an MPhil in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University.
Alexander Noyes
Post - Doctoral Researcher
Alexander received his PhD from Yale University in 2021 and joined the Cooperation Lab in Fall 2024. He is interested in concepts of social institutions. He studies how people use relations to social institutions as a basis for inductive generalization. For example, how we use the relationship between lawyers and the legal system, Jews and Judaism, and Black Americans and the healthcare system to infer "lawyers defend clients,” "Jews keep kosher,” and "Black Americans are undertreated for pain." Alexander shows that people see social institutions—such as courts, congregations, and sports teams—as structured wholes. For example, a court is a way of designing a system of rules to organize people into a functional unit. Alexander is interested in when and how this insight emerges during childhood.
Jacob Glassman
Graduate Student
Jacob is a fourth-year Ph.D. student and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Cooperation Lab at Boston College. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland with degrees in psychology, philosophy, and a minor in statistics. Jacob's research broadly explores how children and adults think about and engage in intergroup conflict resolution. Collaborating with researchers across four continents, his current work investigates intergroup conflict resolution strategies, developing conceptions of multigenerational intergroup conflict resolution, and how parent sociopolitical attitudes and parenting beliefs shape children’s conflict resolution expectations. Through this work, Jacob aims to identify the processes that foster constructive intergroup relations and to generate knowledge that informs real-world conflict resolution.
Abby McLaughlin
Graduate Student
Abby received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Columbia University and is now a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the Cooperation Lab. She is interested in the development of religious beliefs and the ways in which these beliefs affect children's social behavior. She is also interested in the motivations underlying punitive behavior and forgiveness.
Sophie Riddick
graduate student
Sophie is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Cooperation Lab. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Providence College in December 2021 before working as lab coordinator for the Cooperation Lab for 2.5 years. Sophie is intrigued by children’s developing social cognition, particularly as it relates to their reasoning about resource transfers and wealth inequality. Specifically, she is interested in exploring whether children differentially value and engage with resources as a function of how those resources are acquired (e.g., through self-acquisition or inheritance), and whether children perceive certain types of resource transfers as more legitimate routes to inequality.
Liz Bracht
lab coordinator
Liz received her B.A. in Psychology from Skidmore College. She joined the Cooperation Lab in September 2024.
Victoria Fertig
THESIS STUDENT
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2023.
Emily Park
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2025.
Nora Callahan
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2025.
Isabelle Soberon
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2025.
Grace Wang
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2025.
Avery Leonard
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2025.
Giana Kim
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2025.
Millie Lambert
Research Assistant
Student at University of Bath. Lab member since Fall 2025.
Charlie Badger
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member starting Spring 2026.
Audrey Mills
Research Assistant
Student at Boston College. Lab member starting Spring 2026.
Lab Alumni
Shalini Gautam
Former Post - Doctoral SCholar
Shalini was a post-doctoral researcher in the Cooperation Lab through July 2025. She is now a Lecturer at the University of Queensland. Shalini is particularly interested in how children’s understanding of possibilities in the past, present, and future may influence their moral judgements and behaviours. For example, can young children reflect on how things might have gone differently in the past? Are they able to imagine and prepare for the future? How, and in what way, do children make moral judgements if they cannot yet imagine such possibilities? What moral exemplars influence children’s virtuous behaviour?
Julia Marshall
Former Post - Doctoral Scholar
Julia was a post-doctoral researcher in the Cooperation Lab through June 2024. She is now an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, where she directs the Mind and Morality Lab. Her research aims to develop a better understanding of the psychological roots of human morality.
Richard Ahl
former Post - Doctoral Scholar
Rick was a post-doctoral researcher in the Cooperation Lab through May 2024. His current research is aimed at uncovering children’s intuitive economic theories about resource valuation and distribution, building off his prior finding that children view high-wealth people as likely to share with others. As part of the Virtue Project team at Boston College, he leads studies on how moral exemplars can promote fair and honest behavior in adolescents and adults. In collaboration with Dorsa Amir, he also studies cross-cultural and developmental variation in children’s virtuous behavior.
Paul Deutchman
former Graduate Student
Paul was a graduate student in the Cooperation Lab from August 2018 to May 2023. He is now an Associate Professor of Practice in the Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE) program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a research affiliate of Penn's Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics.
Aaron Baker
Former Lab Coordinator
Aaron joined the Cooperation lab in September of 2020 after receiving his B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley, and worked as a lab manager until August 2022. He is interested in building models that better account for how agents incorporate social information as part of their cognitive mechanisms. He is now a graduate student at Yale University, studying social learning and computational modeling.
Hannah Bolotin
Former Lab Coordinator
Hannah was a lab manager for the Cooperation Lab. She is interested in how intergroup relations and biases influence cooperation and the administration of punishment. She received a B.A. in psychology and education from Wesleyan University and was a part of the lab from June 2019 to December 2021. She is now a part of the Council on Criminal Justice, currently serving as the Manager of External Relations.
Justin Martin
Former POST-DOCTORAL SCHOLAR
Justin was a post-doctoral researcher in our lab from November 2017 to June 2021. Justin's research focused on the ways in which humans regulate each other's behavior. In particular, his research focused on how humans use punishment to change others' behavior, and how this adaptive purpose has shaped the processes underlying punishment. He is now a Lead Data Scientist and VP at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Laurent Pretot
Former POST-Doctoral researcher
Laurent was a SNSF post-doctoral researcher from September 2017 to August 2020. He is now a professor of experimental psychology at Pittsburg State University, Kansas, where he teaches various psychology courses and continues his research on decision-making in children and other animal species.
Melisa Kumar
Former graduate student
Melisa was a graduate student in our lab from January 2018 to December 2020. She now lives in Istanbul, Turkey and is an entrepreneur in the wellness sector.
Mikey Bogese
Former lab coordinator
Mikey was a lab coordinator from January 2019 to August 2019. He went on to get an M.A. in Animal Behavior and Conservation from Hunter College.
Gorana Gonzalez
Former lab coordinator
Gorana was a lab coordinator from May 2016 to May 2019. She received her PhD in Developmental Science from UMass Amherst, where she studied children’s racial social cognition. She is now working in UX research.
Lily Tsoi
FORMER graduate student
Lily was a graduate student from Summer 2016 to Spring 2018. She went on to complete postdoctoral work at Princeton University and is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology and Counseling at Caldwell University.
