Dhara Yu

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I am a PhD student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, advised by Bill Thompson and supported in part by the Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship.

I am interested in understanding the computational principles that underlie social intelligence: how do intelligent agents solve the problems that arise when interacting with others, and what are the distinct benefits conferred by interaction? In particular, I am interested in understanding how people and AI systems develop abstractions such as social norms to coordinate joint action, and the core social learning and reasoning capabilities that underlie this.

I'm excited about principled uses of AI to understand human cognition and behavior, for applications such as analyzing complex and open-ended forms of behavioral data (e.g. natural language traces of interactive reasoning), and extracting new theoretical insights from these more naturalistic sources of data.

I write about topics at the intersection of cognition, computation and metascience on my research blog.

Before my PhD, I spent a year in startup land, and before that, I earned a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.

Publications

Experimental diffusion reveals structural simplification of emerging social norms

Dhara Yu, and Bill D. Thompson (2026).

Under review