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 University as the lab’s first full-time laboratory technician / lab manager. Here, we study the way people understand the social and physical world through neuroimaging, behavioral tests, and developmental studies. While working in the Liulab, I published two first-authored papers: (1) I worked with my undergraduate lab to turn my honors thesis into a publication in Frontiers of Neurology, and (2) I worked with Dr. Shari Liu to publish my independent project on the neural correlates of physical reasoning and spatial reasoning in Neuropsychologia.
Research summary. I am interested in how people create and shape the social world. Social roles, like “lawyer” or “cashier”, only exist against the backdrop of an institution (like “law firm” or “grocery store”) and persist even after the individual occupying the role moves to a different role. How do we understand these socially constructed roles? Is this a domain-specific process, or is this an expanse of dyadic relationship classification? What are the mechanisms to make social roles real (and why do some potential mechanisms, like rule codification, only sometimes work)? A second but related line of research I am interested in is how people understand the institutions themselves. How do the representations people make about social roles shape the judgements people make about institutions? When do people ascribe trustworthiness and/or legitimacy to institutions, and how do these beliefs get updated? I am happy to discuss any of these threads in greater detail, but the ultimate unifying theme between all these different questions is a desire to understand the cognitive representations utilized when people create and shape the structured social world.