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 turn my independent project on the neural correlates of physical reasoning and spatial reasoning into a publication in Neuropsychologia.
Research summary. Institutions are structured, hierarchical social groups where each member occupies a ‘role’ in service of a broader institutional goal. These roles persist beyond the individual occupying them. Someone can leave their role at an institution, but the role is still available for the next individual to occupy it (for example, someone could leave their role as a ‘cashier’, but this concept of a cashier and all it entails does not leave with the individual). I am interested in the unique ways people think about institutions. A few questions I am currently thinking about are: what are the underlying cognitive domains that support institutional understanding? How do the attributions we make about institutions (as a whole) change our attributions about institutional roles? How do we rationalize situations where our understanding of the institutional ‘role’ contradicts our understanding of the individual occupying the role? What are the underlying dimensions of institutional understanding? When do we decide institutions are trustworthy, and how do our judgements of related concepts (like legitimacy and morality) get updated?