Hi! I’m João (John), an Assistant Professor at ISPA. In papers I usually appear as João O. Santos. I work mostly around social psychology, research methods, statistics, and philosophy of science. A lot of what interests me sits somewhere between those areas rather than fitting neatly into just one of them. I also do independent consulting on research methods and data analysis.
My research background is in social psychology, especially in how adults see and treat children as a social category. I also care a great deal about how we do research: whether analyses can be reproduced, whether workflows are easy to inspect, and whether the tools we use help rather than get in the way.
That has gradually led me into building software too. Some of it is for R and research or teaching; more recently I have been tinkering with small tools for Pi and LLM-assisted work. I tend to prefer tools that are simple enough to understand, easy to inspect, and not much cleverer than they need to be.
Selected publications, current appointments, and a fuller record are in my CV. For software, teaching resources, and assorted experiments, see Projects/Work. Shorter writing lives in Notes.
Code is available on GitLab and GitHub.