My research interest is to study the roles of various preferences, motivations, and beliefs in driving political attitudes and behavior, informed by behavioral economics and political psychology. I believe that understanding people’s preferences and motivations (i.e., what people care about) are critical to getting to know people’s behaviors, and so is in the political arena.

I use a range of methods, including machine learning techniques and experimental methods to explore people’s preferences and motivations behind political issues. I analyze people’s attitudes concealed in texts by natural language processing techniques. In the meantime, I use experimental methods to find evidence for causal relationships. Specifically, I use economic experiments to elicit participants’ preferences.

My substantive interest center around the political issues related to collective actions and inequality. In my dissertation, I study people’s trade-off between social welfare and individual liberty in collective action situations. I also study public opinions toward the issues with respect to collective actions, such as climate change and public health crisis. In addition, I have a few projects investigating people’s attitudes and perceptions of fairness and equality, and how they influence redistributive preferences.

I am a Political Science PhD Candidate at Stony Brook University. I am also the Center for Behavioral Political Economy lab manager at Stony Brook University, and a trainee of Detecting and Addressing Bias in Data, Humans, and Institutions, an interdisciplinary National Science Foundation Research Traineeship project.