Tessa is an experimental psychologist interested in social cognition, particularly in how attitudes, beliefs and other psychological representations are formed and changed, both across development and across history. Tessa’s research is driven by the belief that it is only in understanding how something changes (or remains stable) that we can begin to understand the mechanisms and operations of the human mind. To address such questions, Tessa employs leading methods from across cognitive, social, developmental, and quantitative psychology, ranging from rigorous statistics to machine learning and natural language processing techniques applied to big data.
Tessa just obtained her PhD from the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and works with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji.