I specialize in applied social science that helps real people. I'm broadly interested in the structure of our beliefs, how we can scale up productive strategies for learning, how innovation cycles work via social processes, integrating long-missing empirical theories into the study of software teams, diverse mixed-methods and measurement design that better captures multidimensional insight, and how people build coalitional strategies while doing technology work.
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I fight to make my research as open access as possible. Read some of my papers:
Hicks, C. M., Lee, C. S., & Foster-Marks, K. (2025, March 15). AI Skill Threat: How the Structure of Developers’ Beliefs about Software Development Ability Impacts Their Psychological Resilience During Rapid Technology Shift. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2gej5_v2
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Flournoy, J. C., Lee, C. S., Hicks, C. M., & Wu, M. (2025). No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05040.
Hicks, C. M., Hevesi, A. (2024, November 21) A Cumulative Culture Theory for Developer Problem-Solving. PsyArXiv, Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tfjyw
Hicks, C. M. (2024). Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail.
Lee, C.S., Hicks, C.M. & Foster-Marks, K. (2024). “My code is shit”: Negative automatic thoughts and outcomes of a behavioral experiment for code review anxiety. PsyArXiv, Preprint.
Lee, C. S., & Hicks, C. M. (2024). Understanding and effectively mitigating code review anxiety. Empirical Software Engineering, 29(6), 161.
Hicks, C. M., Lee, C. S., Ramsey, M. Developer Thriving: four sociocognitive factors that create resilient productivity on software teams. IEEE Software (2024).
Hicks, C. (2021) It’s Like Coding in the Dark: The need for learning cultures within coding teams [White Paper], Catharsis Consulting. [https://www.catharsisinsight.com/reports]
Weatherholtz, K., Grimaldi, P., Hicks, C., Hill, K.M., Freeman, C., Akbayin-Sahin, B., Coker, C., Ma, J., & Henneman, L. (2020). Use of Khan Academy Official SAT Practice and SAT Achievement: An Observational Study. Mountain View, CA: Khan Academy.
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My research has influenced practice across organizations' engineering and product teams at places like Wells Fargo, Adobe, Google, Duke University, Vanguard, UC San Diego, Stanford University, Coursera, TD Bank, Grainger, Westpac, Coles, Fidelity, Manulife, and the BBC. My research has been highlighted in workshops, panels and keynotes for technology organizations and publications in academic peer-reviewed venues such as IEEE Software, Empirical Software Engineering, CHI, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, Developmental Science, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, the Journal of Workplace Learning, the International Convention of Psychological Science, Coursera Partners' Conference, and Infant and Child Development.
