Shereen Chaudhry

Shereen Chaudhry is an Associate Professor of Behavioral Science and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research examines how people navigate social interactions through language and speech acts, applying insights from psychology, economics, and neuroscience to understand communication patterns in organizational contexts such as conflict management, negotiations, and teamwork.

Dr. Chaudhry received her PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Social and Decision Sciences. She also holds a BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT and a Master of Health Administration from Cornell University. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, where she focused on risk communication strategies.

Her research focuses on the strategic aspects of everyday communication, particularly how thanking, apologizing, bragging, and blaming function as exchanges of responsibility that shape social relationships and organizational dynamics. Chaudhry examines how these seemingly trivial speech acts influence reputation, self-image, and relationship trajectories. Her work reveals how cultural differences impact communication norms, how reminders affect perceptions of genuineness, and how two-sided conflicts create unique barriers to reconciliation. She has demonstrated that self-awareness can paradoxically decrease trust in certain contexts and that gratitude expression can signal relational distance in collectivist cultures.

Chaudhry's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on the strategic nature of social communication, with recent work exploring how self-awareness impacts trust, how credibility disclaimers affect boast believability, and how gratitude expression varies across cultures and relationship types. Her research employs diverse methodologies including laboratory experiments, field studies, and game theoretic analysis to uncover fundamental principles of human interaction in organizational settings.

• Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow

Dr. Chaudhry actively mentors students, with numerous publications featuring student co-authors. Her current research projects include investigations into two-sided transgressions, blame dynamics during conflict, the social implications of generosity breadth, and meta-signals in communication. She teaches courses including 'Strategies and Processes of Negotiation' (Spring 2025) and 'Current Topics in Behavioral Science I' (Winter 2026).

Chaudhry leads research initiatives including the Conversation Research lab, where she and her team investigate the strategic dimensions of everyday communication and its organizational implications, with particular attention to how people manage relationships through speech acts and the downstream consequences for organizational behavior.