Dr. Tamara Niella

Personal information

Tamara Niella began to work on research in social cognition during her undergraduate studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, with a focus on human cooperation and collective decision-making. Afterward, she obtained a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Oregon, where her research explored the importance of face-to-face dialogue in cross-ideological conversations. In her current position as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cognition, Values, and Behavior lab, her work is centered on science communication, aiming to bridge data gaps and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. She has experience working on science education through her past role as an instructor and organizer at Expedicion Ciencia, an Argentinian non-profit focused on teaching scientific and critical thinking through science camps for teenagers and workshops for educators. Additionally, since 2020 she has served as Academic Coordinator for the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights, organizing interdisciplinary workshops on global issues and human rights.

Research interests

• Science communication
• Cross-ideological communication
• Moral judgment
• Polarization
• Mixed-methods
• Group interactions
• Climate change attitudes

Current projects

• Exploring the moral judgment of hypocrisy concerning climate change and its implications for public attitudes
• Initiating a collaborative project to elevate women's voices on their experiences in conventional medicine, utilizing qualitative research methods to complement quantitative data collection via online surveys
• Developing a project aimed at understanding and addressing public opinion dynamics on key scientific topic outside of the US (where mainstream research on the topic has been focused), to then test a framework for mitigating polarization and fostering scientific acceptance

Selected publications

• Niella, T., Jantus, C., Hodges, S.D., Navajas J. (2024). Cross-ideological Communication: The Impact of Real Conversations Compared to Imagined Ones (Manuscript in preparation).
• Navajas, J., Niella, T., Garbulsky, G. et al. (2018) Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds. Nat Hum Behav 2, 126–132.
• Niella, T., Stier-Moses, N., Sigman, M. (2016). Nudging Cooperation in a Crowd Experiment. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0147125.