I am a social psychologist who studies how people decide between right and wrong, and how these decisions impact relationships, organizations, and society.

Currently I am a Senior Advisor at More in Common and a Visiting Scholar at the Wharton School. My research has been published in scientific journals such as Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature Human Behavior.

My work uses insights from social science to understand and bridge political divides. Our research reports (Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape and The Perception Gap: How False Impressions are Pulling Americans Apart) have been highlighted in multiple Presidential campaigns and featured in over 1,500 news articles, including the front page of the New York Times. I have given interviews about this research on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and BBC World News, and authored an accompanied opinion piece about the work in the New York Times entitled “The Psychology of Political Polarization.”

I also write a monthly newsletter containing reflections on morality, mind, and society and play jazzy music (check out my debut solo piano EP, released April 2022, on Spotify). I’m currently based in New Orleans.

You can find me on Twitter at @dyudkin, email me at daniel@moreincommon.com, and find my CV here.

My Story

While I have always been fascinated by life’s “Big Questions”—about consciousness, morality, knowledge, and human nature—one in particular has moved me since the beginning: How do we understand reality? Unfortunately for humans, the instrument we must use to answer this question—the brain—is nothing more than a bundle of neurons, perched atop our bodies like a bowling ball on a candlepin. We are geared toward sex and survival, not truth and accuracy. It’s like peering out at the night sky through a telescope with a distorted lens: to understand what you are looking at, you first have to see how the glass is bent.

For this reason, psychology is more than the study of human nature: it’s also an attempt to comprehend reality itself. Like any good scientist, if we want to understand the world, we first have to understand our own instruments. And understanding how our mental biases shape our understanding of the world is crucial for fostering healthy communities and societies.

Making progress in this quest is the central goal of my career. As an undergraduate at Williams College, I double majored in philosophy and psychology, inspired by the great intellectuals of the past (William James, Aristotle, Newton) who similarly blended philosophical and empirical methods. My senior thesis, which won the department’s highest research award, explored how feelings of scarcity impact people’s perception of time.

After college, I realized (correctly!) that there is no better time to explore very different interests. So I moved to Paris to study jazz piano at the Centre International de la Musique. During this time I gained an appreciation for how culture and language shape how people perceive the world.

After spending eighteen months immersed in the sights and sounds of the city, I wanted to better understand how people live on the other side of the economic spectrum. So I moved to Nicaragua, where I taught 7th and 8th-graders at a school called the Pearl Lagoon Academy of Excellence. My class, entitled “Thinking Critically about our Changing World,” used insights from philosophy, economics, ecology, and psychology to give young people the perspective to make good life decisions. In addition, an after-school soccer program I initiated was granted funding from USAID for supplies and a long-term coach’s salary.

In 2011 I enrolled in graduate school in social psychology at New York University under the mentorship of professors Yaacov Trope and Jay Van Bavel. My research focused on “moral flexibility”: how people’s views about right and wrong change according to their group membership. I wrote about this research, which could help reduce bias in our communities and organizations, in a New York Times article entitled “The Roots of Implicit Bias.”

After graduate school I pursued postdoctoral research at Yale University with professor Molly Crockett, studying how transformative experiences at multi-day mass gatherings (such as the Burning Man festival in central Nevada) can expand people’s “moral circle.” These results show how intense social experiences—from music festivals to corporate retreats—can change how we see and interact with friends and strangers alike.

In 2019, I started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Psychology Department and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. With generous grant support from the Templeton Foundation and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, my colleagues and I used computational methods to explore the “Am I the Asshole?” forum on Reddit—arguably the largest compendium of everyday moral dilemmas ever created. Our results are currently under peer review.

In an effort to do my part to counteract growing polarization and social fracturing in America and around the world, in 2024 I started a full-time role as a Senior Advisor at More in Common to use insights from social science to better understand the roots of political division. Our research reports explore how core beliefs—the “lenses” through which people see the world—drive political polarization in contexts ranging from the office to the Thanksgiving dinner table.

1. In the coming years I plan on continuing to use the tools of social science to help people build better relationships, communities, and societies. Through teaching, speaking, researching, and writing, I hope to do my part to help humanity realize the best version of itself.