QSS postdoctoral fellow Jun Zhao presents at the 113th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association

On August 13, Jun Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College presented a paper at the 113th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, recently held in Philadelphia, PA. Jun’s paper was titled, "Showing Remorse in Mock Criminal Trials,” and it shows that defendants’ expressed remorse influences jurors’ sentencing decisions. Men, especially white men, enjoy greater benefits (in terms of sentence reduction) of displaying remorse than similarly remorseful white women, black men, and black women. Jun and her supervisor at Dartmouth, Kimberly Rogers of the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth, both spoke at a panel at the American Sociological Association meeting that honored the work of Neil McKinnon of the University of Guelph, winner of this year's Emotion Section Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASA. 

Jun has been at Dartmouth since the summer of 2017, and she is currently working on the role of emotion, gender, and culture in perpetuating workplace inequality and criminal injustice. She and Professor Rogers have a joint project exploring the social and psychological mechanisms that motivate self-organized collaborations. In particular, this project examines factors that determine the likelihood of success or failure in online collaborative networks (e.g. GitHub). Jun will be also working on modeling cross-cultural interactions with data collected from university undergraduates and from GitHub programmers.