Alex Mackiel
Alex is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology working with Drs. Amanda Woodward and Alex Shaw. He graduated from Carleton College in 2019 with a B.A. in Psychology and English Literature and then completed a M.S. in Psychological Science at SUNY New Paltz in 2021. During and following his master’s degree he was a research assistant for Harvard University’s Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab and the Music Lab, helping to develop global databases of story and song to assess cross-cultural universals and variation in psychology.
Alex is interested in how humans from infancy to adulthood come to acquire, understand, and create the unspoken rules and norms of social and moral life. He is also interested in how relationships like friendship, kinship, and the caregiver-child bond create moral obligations, expectations, and tradeoffs between values that don’t hold for interactions between strangers.
