My doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania focused on social psychology and the psychology of judgment and decision-making (which includes behavioral economics). My web-based dissertation research identified a paradoxical phenomenon of “disbelieved beliefs” in which people view specific beliefs of theirs to be biased by their desires, yet hold to these beliefs at the same time as considering them inaccurate. (View dissertation (PDF)).

I also completed the pre-internship portion of Penn’s clinical psychology program, thereby obtaining an unusually breadth of training in doctoral-level psychology.

Earlier, at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, I conducted an experiment comparing two ways of helping elementary school children to resist a temptation that conflicted with their overall self-interest. I designed and built a computer-controlled candy dispenser for this study. (View summary (PDF)).

Academic publications

Sabini, J., Siepmann, M., and Stein, J. (2001). The really fundamental attribution error in social psychological research. Psychological Inquiry, 12(1), 1-15.

Baron, J., and Siepmann, M. (2000). Techniques for creating and using Web questionnaires in research and teaching. In M. H. Birnbaum (Ed.) Psychological Experiments on the Internet. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Sabini, J., Siepmann, M., and Stein, J. (2000). Who is embarrassed by what? Cognition and Emotion, 14(2), 213-240.

Sabini, J., Cosmas, K., Siepmann, M., and Stein, J. (1999). Underestimates and truly false consensus effects in estimates of embarrassment and other emotions. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21(3), 223-241.