Flora Zhang

Hi! I am currently a postdoc working with David Levari at Brown University. 

I study people's beliefs about how to acquire (in)tangible things, including intangible skills and tangible property. I'm particularly interested in how people's beliefs about what they are capable of acquiring shape their downstream choices about what to pursue, how much effort to put in, and how well they actually perform. 

Taking an interdisciplinary approach from cognitive science, social psychology, and philosophy, I use a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and natural language processing tools to pursue these questions.

I completed my PhD in Psychology at Yale University, primarily collaborating with Julia Leonard, Julian Jara-Ettinger, and Joshua Knobe. And, prior to that, I received my BA in Philosophy and History of Mathematics and Science at St. John's College and MA in Computational Social Science at The University of Chicago.