Below you can find a sampling of my published and ongoing research. Links to all published papers can be found on my Publications page.

How are collective sentiments represented and reproduced?

One line of my research investigates how shared beliefs take shape and move through social and technological systems.

In one project (Berkebile-Weinberg et al., 2025), we found that a country’s level of concern about climate change was mirrored in the emotional tone of Google Image results for “climate change.” Seeing images from high-concern countries increased viewers’ support for climate policy, suggesting that algorithms not only reflect but can amplify public sentiment.

In an ongoing project using large-scale news data, my collaborators and I have also tracked how descriptions of marginalized groups shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, language about Black people became less semantically linked to words for “humans” compared to language about White people, a pattern suggesting a subtle erosion of humanization during crisis.

In another ongoing line of work, we're studying how people think about progress toward equality. Across experiments, we find that people often assume equality means taking resources from advantaged groups, even when fairer outcomes could be achieved without zero-sum trade-offs. This default framing can make even neutral policies feel threatening.

How does institutional bias propagate?

My theoretical work offers a new way of thinking about how bias takes root in organizations and persists over time. Rather than simply adding up individual prejudices, this work posits that institutional bias emerges from the ongoing interaction between people and the social and technological tools they use. These interactions distribute cognitive labor in ways that make bias part of the system’s routine functioning—allowing it to endure even without openly biased actors. This work is currently under review.

How do system-level threats shape individual-level cognition?

I also study how large-scale threats (like economic scarcity, climate change, or societal instability) shape the way people think, perceive, and act.

In one project (Berkebile-Weinberg et al., 2022), we found that when people were exposed to cues of economic scarcity, they were more likely to endorse negative outgroup stereotypes. Scarcity also shaped how people visually imagined outgroup faces. These patterns suggest that systemic threats can activate stereotypes in ways that help preserve existing hierarchies.

In a global project spanning 60 countries (Berkebile-Weinberg et al., 2024), my collaborators and I tested how 11 climate change messages resonated across political groups. While liberals reported stronger climate beliefs than conservatives, both groups were equally willing to take climate-friendly action. This gap between belief and behavior shows how personal cognition can diverge from system-level goals.