Welcome! I am a graduate student of social psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where I work with Dr. Bill Swann and Dr. Jamie Pennebaker. I am interested in understanding (i) what it means for people to develop deep connections with groups (and ideologies), and (ii) how individuals who are deeply connected with groups deal with threats to their identities.  My work takes a multi-method approach in pursuing these questions, complementing traditional social psychology methods with big data and language analysis methods, which allows me to study these processes in both controlled and natural settings.

I am currently co-leading The Pandemic Project, which attempts to track the social psychological impacts of the current COVID outbreak. Check out our reports of our latest research findings here.

I am also working on several projects examining the responses of deeply connected group members to various kinds of threats including existential (e.g., violence targeted at the group), reputational (e.g., publicly known moral violations by the group), and ideological (e.g., oppositional content encountered online) threats. I am also working toward identifying linguistic markers of group identity.

In previous work, I 've conducted ethnographic research at syncretic religious spaces in North India (i.e., Sufi shrines) to understand how sharing of physical and psychological space influences Hindu-Muslim relations. Before discovering the world of social psychology and research, I was a developer at Microsoft and a Young India Fellow.
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Email me at ashwinia@utexas.edu to say hello! 

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Academic background

Master in Liberal Studies, Psychology specialization, Ashoka University, India (2016)
Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, India (2012)
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