Samuel M. Maione
Social psychology applicant. Current lab-tech / lab manager.
Professional summary. I graduated from SUNY Binghamton in 2023 with a BSc in Integrative Neuroscience, where I earned the Steven W. Kovacs Memorial Award and Undergraduate Research Award for my passion towards psychological research as a volunteer research assistant in Dr. Peter Gerhardstein’s lab. After graduating, I joined Dr. Shari Liu’s lab at Johns Hopkins Univeristy as a full-time laboratory technician / lab manager. Here, we study the way people navigate the social and physical world through neuroimaging, behavioral tests, and developmental studies. While working in the Liulab, I worked with my undergraduate lab to turn my honors thesis into a publication that was recently accepted in Frontiers of Neurology. My first authored paper with Dr. Liu that tests whether human intuitive physical reasoning and goal directed attention rely on shared or distinct neural resources will be submitted for publication in the next few weeks.
Research summary. When we navigate the social world, we occupy multiple identities at once. We become members of coalitions (groups we form with people who are able and willing to coordinate with us, with values dependent on the current people making up the coalition); and we take on roles, in institutions (interconnected networks of roles connected by norms that persist through time and space, even as the people in roles change, with values contingent on the institution as a whole rather than any particular individuals). I am interested in the intersection of coalitions and institutions. Particularly, how coalitions influence institutions (e.g. how many coalition members does it take to change the perceived message of an institution?); when we prioritize our coalition over our institution, or vice-versa (e.g. if an institution announces one thing, but your friend tells you the opposite, who do you listen to, and why?); and the neural underpinnings of group perception (e.g. do we understand institutions, coalitions, groups, and individuals using a common set of neural resources?).
In the real world, confidence in (almost all public) institutions reached a 52 year low in the United States. While a variety of political, economical, and historical reasons undoubtedly play a role in dwindling public perception of institutions, confidence in institutions still sinks lower year after year. The traditional method of studying institutions omits cognitive science perspectives. Perhaps this is the missing piece to turn around this downward spiral: if we can understand the way humans think about institutions, then maybe we can develop avenues to restore confidence in institutions.