Brandon Woo

Brandon Woo is an Assistant Professor in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), affiliated with the College of Letters & Science. He earned a BSc from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from Harvard University, supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he joined UCSB in 2024. His research focuses on understanding how infants and children develop social cognition, particularly in evaluating others' actions, goals, and social interactions. He leads the Foundations of Learning and Knowledge (FOLK) Lab, exploring developmental origins of human learning, cooperation, and social life through studies of infants' and children's social evaluations and mentalizing processes.

Research interests include the role of social connection in cognition, infants' understanding of action goals, and group dynamics. Key contributions include work on early moral reasoning, false belief understanding, and the impact of social contexts on mentalizing. His lab integrates experimental methods to investigate how young humans form representations of social relationships and moral judgments. Brandon emphasizes open science practices and community-building in academic research.

• Education:
  • PhD in Psychology, Harvard University
  • BSc in Psychology, University of British Columbia
• Awards: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship

Publications highlight themes like social evaluation of agents, mental state reasoning in infants, and the developmental foundations of morality. His work bridges developmental psychology with social neuroscience, emphasizing how early social experiences shape cognitive and moral development. The FOLK Lab collaborates on projects exploring perspective-taking, social learning, and the emergence of cooperative behavior in human infants.