Research Statement

The UNITE (Unionization, Narratives, Imagination, Theory, and Empowerment) Lab explores the intersections of collective action, social justice, and cultural narratives through unions, political movements, and human rights. We broadly examine how solidarity and empowerment emerge from remembering the past, agitating in the present, and imagining our futures to shape individual and societal behaviors. As I tell parents and future students at Open Houses: “We study the psychology of burning it all down and empowering others to continue the fight.”

            My work is rooted in cultural political psychology, combining the theoretical groundwork of cultural psychology with experimental work in mainstream political and social psychology (de Saint Laurent et al., 2018; Carriere, 2022b; Carriere, 2024). My work brings in international collaborators, including a recent two-volume edited book series (Carriere 2026a; Carriere 2026b) and a chapter published with a SURE undergraduate student co-author (Carriere, Chaudhary, et al., 2025). My critical lens lends itself well to unique methodological approaches commonly concocted by undergraduate collaborators, many of whom may be statistically shy. Finally, my critical engagement with social psychological research has given me opportunities, such as a Center for Open Science Nature publication and an Institute for Replication comment (in press) at Nature Communications.  

Empowerment as Unionization

My lab’s most active research line focuses on unionization as a form of worker (dis)empowerment. Current research suggests that while general support for unions is high, it varies significantly based on political ideology and system-justifying beliefs (Flores-Robles et al., 2026). My 2024 SURE student, Leah Goldman, learned a coding language (Twine) and developed a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experimental paradigm that allows participants to navigate workplace scenarios and decide about unionization in a controlled, immersive environment (Goldman & Carriere, in prep). We also examined how scholars in different majors (and thus, different expected union contact for their careers) differ. The paradigm is easy to extend, for example, by exposing participants to an anti-union video, or comparing high schoolers in trade schools (trained toward union-heavy trades) against typical high schoolers. Adolescents remain understudied as a social/political psychology population, even though younger workers are the least unionized and thus the largest target for union drives.

Graduate Worker Solidarity

Graduate workers are a particularly interesting case for unions, as they are bargaining for a contract and benefits that they will not receive in full (with the promise of graduation ahead), so the psychological negotiations of what solidarity means are highly salient to them. This summer, two SURE students interviewed Harvard graduate students about their recent strike action this past Spring. These interviews join a corpus of interview data from Georgetown University and Brown University graduate workers. I currently have a directed study student assisting with qualitative coding of these interviews, and together they will produce the first of many possible manuscripts from this dataset.

 Relational Costs of Unionization

However, research has failed to address the negative outcomes of unionization. Working with a Stonehill scholar, we commented on a cultural psychological model of affect to explain how research has failed to adequately consider the potential negative social consequences of collective action (Carriere & Richardson, 2024), and with another undergraduate student, we have a book chapter on collective action as a form of compliance that also highlights the limitations of the classic social identity model of collective action in terms of how it fails to account for relational interactions (Carriere & Pinheiro, in press).

Another consequence of unionization is the cost of strike actions on the community. We also have a dataset of over 300 hours of public comments from communities whose public school teachers have gone on strike. A group of five scholars began collecting and analyzing this corpus, arguing in poster presentations that teacher strikes are contentious sites of negotiation, but not just of pay and benefits. Instead, the community must negotiate its democratic values, reframe its relationships with teachers, and determine what its children’s education is worth.

Empowerment Beyond Unions

But empowerment comes in many forms. For some, the drive to change comes from imaginative worlds and fiction, fighting for free trade chocolate in the name of Harry Potter's house elves (Carriere, 2018a, 2018b; 2019a). Others see fear as a powerful motive that empowers the government to strip rights from both outgroups and its own ingroup (Geedy-Gill & Carriere, 2024). In this study, an undergraduate student developed a novel tradeoff framework to examine the extent to which participants were willing to relinquish their rights in exchange for a security guarantee. Others still use historical reenactments as a form of empowerment against centuries of injustice and violence.

Empowerment Through Reenactment & Collective Memory of Memorials

Our lab received a grant to investigate historical reenactments that challenge the narrative of racial progress in America. Once a year, a small community in Georgia reenacts the last mass lynching in the United States. Across three studies, my undergraduate researchers and I used mixed methods to measure changes in participants’ beliefs in racial equality before and after viewing either the dark reenactment of Moore’s Ford or various control conditions, including a reenactment of Gettysburg and a seven-minute moment of silence for George Floyd. Our findings showed that reminding individuals of the past does not always improve their ability to estimate the true racial progress gap.

In a similar vein, one of my senior thesis scholars examined over 158,000 Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews of various memorials worldwide, finding that ‘counter memorials’ (9/11, MMJE) evoke quantitatively different sentiments compared to the more ‘standard memorials’ and that these emotions were predictive of the type of memorial being reviewed (Mulderig et al., 2025), and future research plans to explore whether there are differences if the reviewer is from the memorial’s country. We also have interviews with individuals exploring the New England Holocaust Memorial’s online tour to understand how technology may affect patrons' experiences with these countermemorials, whose data has been collected solely in person.

Empowerment Through Student Interests

Finally, I am incredibly proud of the scholar-led meta-perceptions project, which received both external and internal funding. Two undergraduate scholars showed that disrupting perceptions of how we believe others perceive us can decrease dehumanization; however, it does not increase future intent to interact (Carriere, Hallenbeck, et al., 2024). We also analyzed participants' messages to their perceived partner and ideological opposite, utilizing sentiment analysis to describe the language used when meta-perceptions are disrupted. This novel design of introducing an atypical other to disrupt a meta-perception was not seen in the literature until our publication.

Conclusion

My work investigates how people respond to, seek, and resist empowerment. It is broad enough to engage various undergraduate scholars, topical enough to gain their interest, and narrow enough to ensure their work is meaningful enough to warrant publication. This work interests the academic community and funders. Thus far, I have received $32,450 in research-related grants, $3,000 in teaching-related grants, over $2,000 in travel-related grants, and a $60,000 postdoctoral grant.