Gordon Kraft-Todd is a Psychology PhD student at Yale University who studies prosocial behavior. He has two main research interests: 1) the diffusion of cooperative innovations, i.e. how rare, individually costly but socially beneficial behavior spreads; and 2) evolutionary relational mechanisms of moral cognition, i.e. how social dilemmas inherent to distinct interpersonal relationships shape how we think about morality. He is particularly interested in studying these phenomena in the context of public goods, such as charitable giving and energy conservation.
He is a co-founder of the Applied Cooperation Team at Yale, a team of interdisciplinary academics who apply lessons from the social sciences literature on cooperation to increase contributions to real-world public goods in partnership with government agencies, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. He received his AB from Harvard College in 2007 with an independently designed major in Leadership, and was a co-founder of the Leadership Institute at Harvard College. He owes much of his knowledge about leadership and prosocial behavior to Camp Becket, where he spent 13 happy summers.
