Born north of the Mason-Dixon line but raised in Alabama, Erin Robbins lacks the ice-fishing skills of her northern relatives and mint julep making skills of her southern kin. To compensate for this, she decided to start studying everything. As an undergraduate at Birmingham-Southern College, Erin earned degrees in philosophy and biology-psychology and was the recipient of two Vail fellowships. She served as copy editor for the philosophic journal Sartre Studies International, researched endangered plant communities as part of conservation efforts in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, collaborated on a public health project with NASA, and won the Psi Chi Regional Award for psychological research at the 2006 MPA conference.

Erin's primary research interest is in the origins and development of social cognition, particularly moral reasoning. She has addressed this question using game theoretical paradigms, as well as measures of perspective-taking and Theory of Mind. As part of her Master's thesis, Erin studied how children (3- to 7-years-old) gradually come to have a concern for social evaluation and reputation, and she is currently working on projects that examine cross-cultural variations in the expression of strong reciprocity, inequity aversion, and loss aversion in children. Tangential to these projects, Erin is also intrigued by recent work on children's meta-cognition and future-oriented reasoning, as well as infant studies on social categorization.

 

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