All colloquiums will be held in person. Fall colloquia will be held in WGR 208. The location for spring colloquia will be posted after room reservations are confirmed. Please send an email to gupsychologydepartment@georgetown.edu for additional information.
October 3, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Sudeep Bhatia, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Sudeep Bhatia studies the cognitive basis of human judgment and decision making with the use of mathematical and computational models. There are two interrelated components of his research program. The first involves understanding how people sample and aggregate information in order to form preferences and beliefs: he extends psychological research on perceptual decision making and memory retrieval to explain behavioral findings in domains such as multiattribute choice, risky choice, and probability judgment. The second component involves specifying the information that is sampled and aggregated in order to form preferences and beliefs. Particularly, he applies methodological insights from semantic memory research and computational linguistics to uncover knowledge representations for objects, attributes, and events that are the focus of everyday judgment and decision tasks. With progress in both these areas, he aims to build models of judgment and decision making that know what people know and use knowledge in the way people use knowledge. These models should be able to deliberate over and respond to a large variety of everyday decision problems, and moreover, mimic human responses to these problems.
Title: Knowledge Representation in Everyday Cognition and Behavior
Dr. Bhatia discusses how representations derived from large language models (LLMs) can be combined with established theories of cognition to build computational models of naturalistic human behavior. In addition to specifying the information processing mechanisms people use to form beliefs and preferences, these models also represent the information on which these mechanisms operate in everyday settings. Subsequently, they are able to deliberate over and respond to naturalistic judgment, decision making, and reasoning problems, and moreover, mimic human responses to these problems. Dr. Bhatia demonstrates the applicability of these models to domains as diverse as memory retrieval, semantic cognition, inductive reasoning, social cognition, political judgment, risk perception, health judgment, personality research, and consumer behavior. These models shed light on how people think and decide in their everyday lives, and illustrate a powerful new approach to predicting real-world behavior.
October 24, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Nancy Sin, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia
Nancy L. Sin, PhD, FGSA (she/her) is a health psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside, followed by postdoctoral training as an NIA-funded National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and at the Center for Healthy Aging at The Pennsylvania State University.
Her research focuses on biological, psychological, and behavioral pathways linking stress and well-being in daily life to health across the lifespan. Dr. Sin’s research is published in top-tier journals for psychology, behavioral medicine, and gerontology, and her work is also featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and Scientific American. In recognition of her scientific contributions, Dr. Sin was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Springer Early Career Achievement Award in Research on Adult Development and Aging, Michael Smith Health Research Scholar Award, and Innovative Research on Aging Award from the Mather Institute. She is also a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.
Dr. Sin has held leadership roles in the American Psychological Association and the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine (SBSM), including serving as Co-Chair of the SBSM Antiracism Task Force. Dr. Sin established and served as inaugural director of the UBC Psychology Diversity Mentorship Program to provide mentorship to students from underrepresented, under-resourced, and/or systemically marginalized backgrounds.
Title: Don’t forget your SPF: Daily PsychoSocial Protective Factors in Adult Development and Aging
To understand well-being, we should look to how people face major and minor challenges in their lives. I am a health psychologist interested in how the ups and downs of daily life influence health and well-being across adulthood, with the goal of identifying psychosocial protective factors. Using ecological approaches (e.g., daily diaries, field-based ambulatory health measures), I have found that daily positive events—such as having engaging conversations or spending time in nature—are associated with better aging-related health outcomes, including lower inflammation, better sleep, and adaptive patterns of diurnal cortisol. Positive experiences in daily life are also important for counteracting stress. In this presentation, I will share insights gained from studying well-being in the context of life’s difficulties, ranging from common daily stressors to the COVID-19 pandemic to social inequity. Throughout the talk, I will offer advice for trainees and early career researchers based on lessons learned. The presentation will conclude by looking ahead to imagine the future of psychology research at the intersection of well-being, health, and aging.
November 7, 2025, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Ariel Kalil, Daniel Levin Professor, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Dr. Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab. She is a developmental psychologist who studies economic conditions, parenting, and child development. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Stavanger School of Business and Law and at NHH the Norwegian School of Economics. She is currently an Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families Over the Life Course. At the BIP Lab, she draws on insights from behavioral economics and neuroscience to design and experimentally test technology-based interventions to strengthen parental engagement and child skill development in low-income families.
Why do so many American children start school already behind—and what can be done about it? Decades of research have shown that the roots of inequality develop in the earliest years, reflecting differences in skill-building opportunities within children’s home environments. Traditional parent programs aimed at addressing this issue are costly and difficult to scale. In this seminar, Professor Ariel Kalil, the Daniel Levin Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, will share the story and present new experimental results from the “Chat2Learn” parenting intervention. Chat2Learn is an AI-powered messaging tool developed at the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago. It sends conversation prompts and illustrations to parents’ phones, encouraging the habits of parent-child talk that develop language, curiosity, and socio-emotional skills in preschool children. Chat2Learn demonstrates how behavioral science and technology can work together to support parents and reduce children’s skill gaps at scale.
December 5, 2025, 12 pm
Faculty Symposium
February 20, 2026, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Allison Redlich, Associate Chair and Distinguished University Professor, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University
Dr. Allison D. Redlich is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, where she runs the Modeling Decision-Making in the Legal System laboratory (MoDiLS). She is a past President of the American Psychology-Law Society, a former Visiting Scholar at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, and a Fellow of APA and APS. Trained as a developmental psychologist, her research centers on whether legal decision-making is knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. She examines such decision-making in vulnerable (juveniles and persons with mental health problems) and non-vulnerable persons, and across several different contexts—in the interrogation room, during the guilty plea process, and in mental health courts. Dr. Redlich also conducts research on wrongful convictions, with a focus on false confessions and false guilty pleas. Dr. Redlich is the recipient of the Beck Family Presidential Medal for Excellence in Faculty Research and two national teaching and mentoring awards, for which she is most proud.
Title: Dispositional and Situational Risks to the Validity of Guilty Pleas
Guilty pleas account for almost all state and federal convictions. Only about 2-3% of convictions in the US occur through guilty verdicts at trials. When defendants plead guilty, they waive dozens of rights (e.g., presumption of innocence, proof beyond a reasonable doubt) meant to safeguard against miscarriages of justice. As such, the Supreme Court has held that guilty plea decisions must be made knowingly, intelligently, voluntarily, and with a factual basis of guilt. To assess whether defendants’ plea decisions are made in this manner, judges ask yes/no questions of defendants during minutes-long exchanges. In this presentation, Dr. Redlich will review the dispositional and situational factors that increase the risk of invalid guilty pleas. More specifically, she will provide an overview of her recent research examining the legitimacy of plea decisions for juvenile and adult defendants, and the implications for the effectiveness of court procedures used to assess plea decision-making.
March 13, 2026, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Ashley Whillans, Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Dr. Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research on time and happiness won the 2018 CAGS Distinguished Dissertation Award and was named the top PhD thesis in Canada across the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Title: When Resources Become Demands: Understanding Time Management in Hybrid Work
Organizations increasingly encourage hybrid teams to set collaboration norms to connect and to better manage competing work demands. Yet we know little about when and for whom these interventions are effective. This talk presents evidence from a pre-registered field experiment with 193 high-performing teams (N=793) testing whether implementing collaboration norms can improve the experience of hybrid work. Teams were randomly assigned to implement one of three norms designed to protect focused time and enable connection: designating team-level focused time, limiting after-hours communication, or strategically scheduling meetings. While these norms increased self-reported feelings of time control and team connection, teams who were facing higher coordination demands (larger team size, greater geographic distribution) struggled to adhere to these practices. Building on these findings, I develop a theory about “meta-resources” – factors that influence how effectively other resources can be deployed. I argue that under certain high-demand situations, workplace practices that are designed to increase wellbeing and that preserve choice, may create additional burden rather than relief, helping to explain why well-intentioned workplace interventions often fail precisely when teams need them most. I contextualize these findings within a broader research program examining critical interactions for knowledge workers (N=324, Obs=4,785) and ethnographic research conducted during the COVID-19 transition to virtual work (N=78). This research advances our understanding of when and how workplace resources can become demands, while offering practical insights for workplaces seeking to support employee well-being.
April 10, 2026, 12 pm
Speaker: Dr. Tristen Inagaki, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, San Diego State University
Title: TBD
April 17, 2026, 12 pm
Graduate Student Presentations