Social Motifs
The Social Motifs lab examines the ideas and beliefs that underlay principles of organization and social relationships. We explore the architecture of individual responsibility and awareness in a social context, with a goal of identifying invisible mechanisms that interrupt meaningful human interactions.
We aim to create solutions that actively confront the barriers to our fundamental capacity to understand one another, targeting a variety of factors such as social power dynamics, predisposed fears and perceptions, self-control, and social goals.
Questions
- How do group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others? (Inspired by Mina Cikara, Ph.D.)
- How do we build communities that promote social mindfulness and challenge social mindlessness?
- How do we prioritize the voices of underepresented individuals and groups?
- To what extent does research design impact policy and the distribution of resources?
- How can we make social awareness more
Objectives
- Study the successes of social media and apply stratgies toward social movements
- Identify the weakest links of the education system and the inflection points with the greatest impact to students, educators, and schools
- To develop innovative teaching methods that translate into unconventional intellectual experiences
- To build meaningful opportunities for intellectual growth inside and outside the formal classroom space
- To directly address the systemic biases and limitations