Ashley J Thomas

Ashley J Thomas is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University, specializing in infant and child social cognition. Her research explores how young humans develop naive sociology, focusing on social hierarchy, intimacy perception, and moral judgments of parenting decisions.

• Education: PhD in Psychology (2018), MA in Psychology (2015) from UC Irvine, BA in Architecture (2008) from UC Berkeley.

Her work reveals infants use caregiver interactions to evaluate social partners and demonstrates that saliva sharing serves as a key cue for relationship recognition. She examines how implicit theories of intelligence correlate with brain plasticity beliefs, showing that malleable intelligence theories align with environmental influence acceptance.

Scientific awards include the NIH National Research Service Award and multiple fellowships. She has organized symposia on social cognition at the Cognitive Development Society and Society for Research on Child Development conferences.