INTERESTED IN JOINING THE LAB?

Postdoctoral Fellow positions
We will be recruiting a postdoc to begin in Fall 2025. A formal advertisement will be posted in December 2024 (watch this space). Current PhD students who are interested in doing a postdoc in the lab should email Prof Crockett with a CV, a brief description of how your research interests intersect with the lab’s current work, and 1-3 papers/preprints that are representative of your skills and interests. Prospective postdocs are encouraged to reach out early, ideally a year or more before they wish to start, in order to determine fit and explore funding possibilities.

PhD Student positions
We will be considering PhD applicants for the November 2024 deadline (i.e., for prospective students looking to start in Fall 2025). For application information, see here. This application cycle, we are especially interested in applicants who want to work on the research themes “cultural evolution of morality” and/or “narrative testimony and epistemic power” (see our Research page for more details on these themes). Our lab is building collaborations with Natalia Vélez on these topics, so if you are interested in her work as well, it’s a good idea to list her as a secondary advisor when you apply, so she will see your application. Please note that we are only rarely using neuroscience methods in our work, so applicants who are primarily interested in pursuing neuroscience research are not a good fit for the lab at this time.

Your personal statement is the most important part of your application to our lab. We want to know three things in particular: (1) which research theme(s) within our lab you are especially interested in, and why; (2) your specific ideas and research questions within the theme(s) you’re interested in; and (3) how your life experiences and/or research experiences have prepared you to do this work. Take a look at our current research on your chosen theme(s), especially the representative publications, to get a sense for the questions we’re currently thinking about and the methods we use to address those questions. We’ll also pay attention to your writing sample. Please submit something that reflects primarily your own work; we’d rather read a class assignment than a preprint or published paper that you played only a minor role in. Finally, your references matter a lot: please submit at least one reference from someone you’ve worked with closely, ideally for at least a year, even if it’s outside of an academic context. This article offers excellent further advice on preparing your graduate application materials.

A note on using GPT or other large language models for assistance with your application materials: please do not use these products as as source of ideas or drafts. We are not interested in reading cookie-cutter statements containing machine summaries of the lab’s research topics, which typically fail to grasp important nuances and goals of our work even as they sound superficially reasonable. We want to know about your original ideas and see how you think and write.

For equity reasons, Professor Crockett is unable to correspond or meet with applicants prior to the application deadline.

Post-Baccalaureate Researcher positions
We are not considering post-baccalaureate researcher applications at this time.

Undergraduate Researcher positions
Princeton undergraduates looking to get involved in research for course credit (via PSY 230/231, JP, or senior thesis) should email Prof Crockett with a CV and a brief description of how their research interests intersect with the lab’s current work.

Volunteer Researcher positions
We are not able to consider volunteer interns or research assistants.

We believe that our science is better with a diverse team. We embrace and encourage our lab members’ differences in race, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, socio-economic status, first-generation status, family or marital status, language, national origin, political affiliation, religion, veteran status, and other characteristics that make our lab members who they are.