Abhay Alaukik

Hi! I am a PhD candidate at the University of Florida studying social and cognitive psychology with computational/mathematical models to help develop better theories.  Broadly, I'm interested in moral and political psychology. My current projects (a) evaluate how people end up with polarized and extreme information even without explicitly biasing processes because of goal-directed and rational information sampling, (b) modeling associations between social groups (e.g., race) and valence (good vs. bad), (c) understanding how Americans conceptualize "freedom," and (d) the dynamics of moral outrage (especially online).

Besides computational modeling, I also frequently use advanced statistical tools like Bayesian stats, hierarchical modeling, a variety of dimensionality reduction techniques, deep neural networks, and agent-based modeling in my projects.

I am on the job market!