Portrait of Nakwon Rim

Nakwon Rim / 임낙원

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

My primary advisors are Marc G. Berman and Yuan Chang Leong, and I collaborate with Wilma A. Bainbridge and James A. Evans.

CV

Research Interests

I study why some (social) information is processed more than others. This prioritization sometimes diverges across groups, such as political partisans seeing the world differently, and is sometimes shared across people, such as some faces being more remembered than others. To study these questions, I primarily use computational methods combined with behavioral and neuroimaging experiments.

Selected publications for each research interest are shown below. For a complete list, please see my Google Scholar profile .

Group Differences in Information Processing

Why do different groups of people (e.g., political partisans) process the same information differently?

Related Publications

Figure from Rim et al. (2026), Communications Psychology
Natural language reveals that political partisans are more affectively aligned over political issues than partisan identities

2026

Rim, N., Jackson, J. C., Berman, M. G., & Leong, Y. C.

Communications Psychology, 4(1), 65.

We analyzed ~300 million Reddit comments and ~7 million news articles from partisan sources and found that partisan language is less affectively divided over political issues than over identity labels, suggesting meaningful affective alignment despite partisan animosity.

Paper Code
Figure from Sulik et al. (2025), Nature Human Behaviour
Differences in psychologists' cognitive traits are associated with scientific divides

2025

Sulik, J., Rim, N., Pontikes, E., Evans, J., & Lupyan, G.

Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 1147–1161.

Scientific disagreements are not just a matter of using different methods or having conflicting data: we surveyed 7,973 researchers in psychological sciences and found that disagreements are also associated with what they research and with their cognitive traits.

Paper Code

Stimulus-driven Memorability

Why is some information (e.g., faces, scenes) consistently more memorable than others, across different people?

Related Publications

Animated figure from Rim et al. (in preparation)
Facial Features Underlying Social Judgments Affect Face Memorability

In Preparation

Rim, N., Berman, M. G., Uddenberg, S., & Bainbridge, W. A.

Animated figure from Rim et al. (2025), PsyArXiv
Natural scenes are more compressible and less memorable than human-made scenes

2025

Rim, N., Veillette, J., Lee, S. M., Kardan, O., Krishnan, S., Bainbridge, W. A., & Berman, M. G.

PsyArXiv

Across three behavioral experiments and a computational analysis of 108,754 scene images, we found that natural scenes contain less noticeable information than human-made scenes, making them more compressible, and that they are less memorable.

Paper Code