Hi! Andre here. Thank you for visiting my website.

I am an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto (tenure-track; Summer 2021). I am receiving my PhD in social psychology at the University of California, Davis, where I am a member of the Attitudes and Group Identity Lab (PI: Alison Ledgerwood). I am also affiliated with the Social Inference Lab (PI: Andrew Todd) and the Psychological Models and Measurement Lab (PI: Mijke Rhemtulla).

My research incorporates insights and methods from social, cognitive, and quantitative psychology to better understand how people connect abstract ideas to concrete experiences. One of the human mind’s most impressive feats is to think beyond the here and now: People can generate predictions about the future, make inferences about their general preferences from specific experiences, and reason about broad moral values. Where do these abstract ideas come from? What happens when people’s abstract ideas—about themselves, other people, and the world—become disconnected from actual, context-specific experiences? These questions motivate my research.

You can contact me at ylawang@ucdavis.edu, follow me on Twitter @andrewang91, or check out my Google Scholar page and my OSF page.