The good life
What does a life of learning new things offer?
A good life can be comfortable and purposeful. But where do unfamiliar experiences, unanswered questions, and changes of perspective fit in?
Worth exploring
I study an overlooked part of well-being: the value of curiosity and exploration.
I am a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of Chicago, working with Shigehiro Oishi. I study a life of learning new things: what it offers, what constrains it, and what expands it. My research connects these questions to the division of labor, economic inequality, and the places and conversations people encounter.
How I came to these questionsQuestions I’m working on
All research
Work & curiosity
When does “not my job” become “not worth knowing”?
Dividing work helps us become efficient. My experiments ask what happens to curiosity when people take on a narrow role—even their curiosity about things outside the task.
Inequality & aspirations
Why do so many children dream of the same jobs?
Exploring also means imagining who we might become. I study why young people’s ambitions crowd into a few popular occupations, and how inequality may narrow the futures they consider.
Cities & new experiences
Can a city make room for curiosity?
A bookstore, a museum, a place you did not plan to visit. I study where people find new perspectives—and whether having those places close together makes a difference.
AI & conversation
Can a conversation make us curious again?
What would an AI conversation look like if it put psychological richness first? We steer a model’s internal representations to test whether a conversation can renew interest in a topic someone has dismissed.
Third places · Space & exploration
Chicago Experience Atlas
The Chicago prototype of the Good Life Atlas. Reflect on your well-being, then explore places beyond home and work through happiness, meaning, and psychological richness.
DiscoverAssess your well-beingExplore places
Conversation · AI & exploration
Exploration through conversation
What might a conversation with an AI steered toward psychological richness feel like? Could it invite you to consider a different perspective—or take a fresh interest in a topic you once dismissed?
This demo builds on our research into steering language models through their internal representations of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness.
Try the conversationResearch demo · The first response may take about a minute.
The research behind the conversation
Psychology’s New Lever: Steering the Good Life Inside Large Language Models
Manuscript in preparation · Abstract submitted to SPSP 2027; decision pending.
We identified nearly orthogonal directions corresponding to happiness, meaning, and psychological richness within one language model and experimentally steered those directions. In a collaborator-choice task, richness steering increased exploration, happiness steering decreased it, and meaning steering had no effect.
In a preregistered study, participants who talked with a richness-steered model rated the conversation as more perspective-broadening and reported greater interest in an initially dismissed social issue than those who talked with a baseline model. Happiness steering showed no comparable pattern.
Selected publications
All publicationsPNAS
Gratitude interventions across cultures
A meta-analysis examining gratitude interventions and well-being.
PNAS Nexus
Inequality and the income–happiness link
How economic conditions relate to the association between money and happiness.