What do I study?  Everyone I meet--students, friends, colleagues, my family--wants a simple answer to this.  Something like: I study why startups succeed.  But the answer that emerges is generally closer to: I study how sociocognitive categories generate bias in the evaluation of novelty. Which is just awful.  

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So what do I study?   My current focus is on bias and entrepreneurship.  From afar entrepreneurship looks like the best example of a meritocracy that we can muster.  If you are brilliant and hard-working, you just step outside of that ossified, bureaucratic firm and let the world pour money on your head.

Or something like that.  

 

I try to understand why that is not true.   Why women or minorities have a hard time persuading people that their ideas are good ideas, how people make sense of a product unlike any they've seen before, and how this works better (or worse) when we move it from the hands of experts to a market. 

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Currently, I have ongoing projects examining how gender and ethnicity influence the appraisal of founders; how the costs of pursuing entrepreneurship varies across populations, and how assumptions regarding who is a "legitimate" entrepreneur shape perception and how they might be reshaped.  These projects, and the ones that preceded them generally fall into one of the three camps diagrammed below.