Sana Khan is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University, advised by Professors Betsy Levy Paluck and Eldar Shafir.

Perspective-taking in the field

In her primary line of research, Sana examines the strategies that people use to understand and make suppositions about the minds of others and analyzes the consequences of these processes. In her current work, she employs large-scale field experiments to study this in the context of hypothetical and actual citizen-refugee encounters to understand what can change citizens’ subjective and policy attitudes toward refugees.

Deviation from social norms

In a second line of research, Sana is broadly interested in understanding the role of individual acts of deviance from established and expected behavior (social norms) in a given society in producing social change. Her current research asks the following questions: how does an invitation to deviate from a social norm influence an individuals’ perception of themselves, their community, and the norm itself? Does deviating from a particular social norm at one point in time create a pattern of deviance for other related behavior in the future? She uses online games and field experiments to address these questions.

Sana has 10+ years’ experience of undertaking research in development and humanitarian contexts. She has worked at Innovations for Poverty Action, The World Bank, and the International Rescue Committee. Sana holds a Master’s degree in International Relations, with a concentration in International Development and Economics, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelors in Economics and Psychology from Trinity College, CT.