Yuka Machino

I am PhD Student at Stanford studying Cognitive Science and Computational Social Science, advised by Prof. Robert Hawkins, and　Prof. Douglas Guilbeault.

I am interested in how social norms and common ground help individuals in a community coordinate and communicate. Because everyone knows a Rolex is expensive, wearing one signals wealth; an equally costly but obscure watch would not. Because everyone knows the norms of polite speech, you can hear a friend’s “it’s not bad” about your cooking as kindness rather than a verdict. To study how such common ground is built and how it guides interaction, I combine behavioral experiments with computational models, to understand how communities and individuals relate to each other.

Prior to Stanford, I completed bachelor’s degrees in math and computer science, and my master’s in computer science at MIT.