Flora Zhang

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

I study people's beliefs about how to acquire intangible and tangible things, ranging from skills and abilities to physical objects. I'm particularly interested in how people's beliefs about acquisition shape their downstream choices about what to pursue, how much effort to apply, and how well they actually perform for various tasks. I explore these questions and others using a combination of behavioral experiments, large-scale data analysis, computational modeling, and natural language processing tools.

I completed my PhD in Psychology at Yale University, primarily collaborating with Julia Leonard, Julian Jara-Ettinger, and Joshua Knobe. 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.