Stephen Ostertag

Dr. Stephen F. Ostertag’s scholarship examines the role of interpretations, emotions, and culture for human behavior. He has spent over two decades exploring this relationship, diving into the significance of trust, moralities, uncertainty, cultural codes, norms, motives and drives for collective action.

Dr. Ostertag’s past research focuses on social media use in the wake of disaster. Using the months and years following hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as a case study, he investigated the shared problems, frustrations, and norms that motivated and guided how people rebuilt their lives over the extended recovery period, and how residents used social media to communicate, coordinate, build trust, and organize around their needs over this period of ongoing, shifting traumas and uncertainty. The findings are published in numerous peer-reviewed articles and his 2023 book Connecting after Chaos: Social Media and the Extended Aftermath of Disaster (NYU Press).

Dr. Ostertag’s current project extends his interest in understanding human behavior into the field of medicine and healthcare, where he is currently designing a long-term, national-level study on the role of trust and experience for healthcare avoidance and delayed care. Using his knowledge of culture and the dynamic forces and resources that inform collective behavior, Dr. Ostertag is building upon simplified understandings of action that populate healthcare and medical research to devise a more thorough and useful model of healthcare behavior. The findings will advance academic research and be used by healthcare providers to inform practical approaches to increase healthcare adherence, reduce illness and suffering due to delayed care, and cut down on the cost of healthcare services to families and insurers.

Based on the past two decades of research, Dr. Ostertag has created the MORR Framework of human behavior and collective action. The framework integrates existing knowledge of culture and action in sociology with emerging research in biology, psychology, and neurosciences to holistically understand, interpret, and predict human behavior. The MORR Framework emphasis the importance of Motives, Opportunities, Rationalizations, and Resources, as these collectively underlie human behavior.

Lastly, Dr. Ostertag has worked in industry managing and conducting summative user experience research for companies like Google and Meta, and has consulted on research design and strategies for companies in need of validation, human-factors research and FDA clearance for Class 2 medical devices (510(k)).