I recently completed my Ph.D. at MIT Sloan and am currently the Houlden Postdoctoral Fellow in Warwick Business School's Behavioural Science Group. I study how information (or the lack thereof) affects human behavior.

On one hand, I'm very interested in what I call acting as if and related phenomena like Newcomb's Problem. People sometimes act as if they have control over events they know they can't influence, especially when they're under certain kinds of uncertainty. For instance, someone dress shopping might choose a dress from a boutique over one from a chain store specifically because she liked the chain store dress; her own positive reaction to the chain store dress suggests it will be popular this summer—other people eyeing it in the window will have that feeling too and will buy it—and if it's popular, it will be less striking.

On the other, I study cultural evolution with tools I've developed for measuring the flow of memes through minds. These tools are quantitative (in that we end up with bits and so have a common currency), content-agnostic (so we don't have to take a stand about the right questions to ask), and widely applicable (to anything you can parameterize such that a person can guess at what symbol comes next—language, music, or chess). I am applying these techniques to basic questions in cultural evolution, language and communication, education, and marketing.