Cultural defaults—the thoughts, practices, and people perceived as typical, standard, and desirable—are central to shaping a society’s institutions and individual beliefs. Yet, despite being deeply rooted in daily life, cultural defaults can be overlooked as sources of intergroup tension. My research reveals how seemingly objective, neutral, and even positive cultural defaults contribute to real-world social problems.

I primarily investigate how cultural defaults shape social and economic outcomes. So far, I have examined how racial defaults surrounding homeownership contribute to historic wealth gaps in the United States, how default assumptions about gender differences lead popular equity policies to have unintentionally negative consequences, and how the core Western value of “individualism” drives gender segregation across academic disciplines and occupations.

While I predominantly test my theories using social psychological experiments and manipulations, I use a range of research methodologies (e.g., “big” observational datasets, qualitative coding) and draw on interdisciplinary insights across the social sciences to inform my theories.