Hana Shepherd

SOCIAL NETWORKS and SOCIAL NORMS
I am currently working on the Roots Program, an intervention program dealing with peer conflict in middle schools. The program is in 60 middle schools in New Jersey. We are investigating how social influence flows through social networks, how to change individuals' perceptions of the social norms, and how perceptions of these social norms impact behavioral patterns, particularly harassment and bullying in schools. This project uses a field experiment to examine change in social networks.

My previous work used a study of a vegetarian co-op to examine the relationship between social network location and perceptions of social norms in the co-op.

CULTURE and COGNITION
Understanding how individuals cognitively encode meaning, share information, and influence one another, are central to understanding the relationship between culture and behavior, and cultural change.

The Cultural Context of Cognition: What the Implicit Association Test Tells Us About How Culture Works
Using Culture to Explain Behavior: An Integrated Approach
Schematic Heterogeneity and Whites' Racial Attitudes

ORGANIZATIONS and INEQUALITY
I am interested in how organizational structure and procedure can contribute to amplifying or diminishing unequal outcomes. I find the work of James March, Herbert Simon, and their colleagues, which outlines cognitively-informed accounts of decision making in organizations, particularly useful.

The Sociology of Discrimination
Classification, Cognition, and Context: The Case of the World Bank
Elites and Decision Making in the Council on Foreign Relations (Dissertation Abstract)

SOCIAL INFLUENCE ONLINE
My collaborators and I have also studied the role social influence plays in shaping the nature of online content.

Emergence of Consensus and Shared Vocabularies in Collaborative Tagging Systems
The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging
Tagging Politics and Consensus