Ben is a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center for Justice. Broadly, Ben is interested in belief change: How do we form and update beliefs about other people, ourselves, and the world around us? He's also interested in understanding how these processes play out in online and digital spaces like social media. At the Center, he works on evaluations of Project Restore that move beyond crime statistics and focus on the psychological and social impacts of Project Restore on program participants and their communities. He is also interested in studying how to most effectively change people's beliefs about those who are justice-involved. Finally, he is an instructor of psychology and data science courses, both at Columbia and at Sing Sing.
Before coming to the Center, Ben received his bachelor's degree from Brown University, worked as a research assistant in a developmental neuroimaging lab at Weill Cornell Medicine, and received his PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. For his PhD, Ben worked with Kevin Ochsner in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience lab. His research focused on how socio-affective motivations impact impression formation and updating. Some of his past projects include using social media data to understand how people updated their impressions of public figures accused of sexual assault, using a virtual escape room to understand how groups of friends change their beliefs about each other's ability to complete group problem-solving tasks, and using functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand how neural representations of potential romantic partners are updated in response to social feedback.