Nichols is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology. His research focuses on social learning as a mechanism for coordination, conformity, and exploration in judgment and decision making. In one line of research that utilizes surveys, text-analysis, and large language models, he and his collaborators examine how the prevalence of normative signals in cable news about democracy shapes second-order beliefs about democratic institutions and processes. Another line of research investigates how social information gleaned from observing others' successes and failures updates individual risk preferences and decision making under uncertainty, with implications for understanding adaptive learning in dynamic environments. He holds a Master’s degree in social sciences with a certificate in computational social sciences from the University of Chicago and a Bachelors in psychology from Stephen F. Austin State University.