Sara Constantino
Bio
Sara Constantino is an assistant professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences and a visiting research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She is also a faculty affiliate at SPARQ and the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. She has an interdisciplinary background at the intersection of economics, psychology, and environmental policy and politics. Her research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual, collective, institutional and ecological factors, including how they shape preferences, decisions, experiences and resilience to extreme events or shocks. In recent and ongoing studies, she is looking at the role of polarization, social norms and governance in stimulating or stifling climate action, including both adaptation and mitigation, and what conditions lead groups mobilize to shape policy and other outcomes. She also works on the impacts and politics of guaranteed income and other cash transfer programs. To answer these questions, she employs a range of methods, including computational modeling and simulations, large-scale field and lab experiments, longitudinal surveys, observational methods, and qualitative interviews.
Research Interests
- Social dynamics
- Collective action
- Collective beliefs
- Tipping points
- Behavior change
- Mitigation
- Adaptation
- Political mobilization
- Social learning
- Social identities
- Institutional change
Stanford University Affiliations
- Woods Institute 2024-ongoing
- King Center on Global Development 2024-ongoing
- Sustainable Societies Initiative 2025-ongoing
- Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) 2026-ongoing
Academic Degrees
- Postdoc in Environmental Policy and Politics
- PhD in Cognitive and Decision Science, New York University
- MA in Economics, University College London
- BA in Economics and Literature, McGill University
Academic Appointments
- Assistant Professor in Public Policy and Psychology at Northeastern University
- Affiliate in Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University
- Affiliate at the Global Action for Policy Initiative, Northeastern
- Faculty Affiliate, J-PAL
- Visiting Research Associate, Princeton University