newsletter: September 2023 📚
meet our first featured guest of this academic year, professor Cristina Salvador!
hi. it’s Eliana😊.
happy September!
🚨 URGENT 🚨 this fall, we are trying something a little different: we are hosting a colloquium in coordination with boston college! we are now inviting applications to speak at boston college on 10.16.23.
The goal of this event is to invite three speakers from our community to promote their work, connect with other interested scholars, and have some snacks! all speakers will receive an honorarium. we also have funds to cover travel (as needed).
if you are an advanced phd student, post-doc, or early career professor (<3 years) please apply!! more information about the opportunity & the application is linked here.
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also…before we go any further we must ask…. do YOU want to be our featured guest for the October newsletter?
shoot us an email, sign up via this google form, or DM us on Twitter & we’ll tell you more!
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September is here, fall semester is in full gear, but have no fear, we are starting off this month with Dr. Cristina Salvador!
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⭐ DON’T FORGET: Cristina will be interviewed by The Stanford Psychology Podcast as our featured guest, look out for the release date! ⭐
Cristina 🏖️☀️🏐🎾🩴🌊
Currently reminiscing about summer before the Fall term starts. On the left is my dog Bali (who loves jumping waves and rolling around in the sand) at the beach. On the right is a picture of me on a summer trip enjoying some amazing sunsets.
about me I am currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. I am originally from Quito, Ecuador. I lived in South America for most of my life (in various countries including Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Ecuador). Growing up in South America and being bicultural (both Latina and American) made me acutely aware of the influence of culture on my behavior from early on. When I started taking courses in psychology and neuroscience I found that the questions that constantly came to mind about the topic I was learning about revolved around how the effect may be different in another culture. My research now centers on examining how culture shapes our biology, social norms, emotions and sense of self. In particular, I hope to expand the work in the literature beyond WEIRD or East-West comparisons to include a larger portion of the Globe in our discipline, such as Latin America. Check out the cite page to learn about some of this work!! Outside of research, I like to play sports (volleyball and tennis are my favorite right now) and travel (being an academic and someone who studies culture definitely helps!!). I also like exploring my new home state, North Carolina. I am a bit of a foodie, so I like to try different restaurants. I also have enjoyed checking out the mountains, DC and beach which are all a reasonable driving distance away!
📺 WATCHING 👀
The Good Place. Eleanor (the main character) was not the greatest to others during her time on earth but made it to “good” afterlife. She tries to hide since she thinks they made a mistake but then learns a lot about others, the afterlife and good and evil. While overall a comedy it does pose interesting questions that make you think about the complexity of morality (whether there are good deeds; how much change is needed to change the essence of a self). So, it may be fun for other psychologists!
Suits. I mostly started watching this show to see Meghan Markle (the now Duchess of Sussex) as part of a show. It’s about a really smart guy who passes as a lawyer and gets to solve interesting cases. There is a love story which is nice and also a lot of drama. I enjoyed the first few seasons, but got a bit busy and stopped after the 5th or 6th season. I may try to finish it at some point.
📚READING 🤓
The All or nothing Marriage. I have recently gotten involved in work on culture & relationships, which made me want to learn more about the social psychology research on relationships. So, I have been reading Eli Finkel’s book summarizing his all or nothing theory about marriage. Essentially, the idea is that people have higher expectations about marriage than they did in the past. So, many marriages fail the test and the divorce rate is higher, however the best marriages today are even more fulfilling than the best marriages years ago. I think it's a really interesting idea and integrates work from various disciplines. I think this area could be expanded quite a bit by examining cultural variation.
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. This book gives a nice overview of some of the research on cultural evolution, such as why humans teach, how we learn to innovate etc. A lot of what I read (or listen to since I like listening to audiobooks in the car or on walks) is research that is related to my main interests, but that I know less about. I really like reading books for general audiences since they give a nice overview of the topic and then I can have some general knowledge about it dig deeper into the empirical work when it's more relevant to a specific project.
👂LISTENING 🎧
A lot of what I have been listening to are happy summer songs. So, songs like Sunshine by One Republic or Tripping Over Air by Aidan Bissett or Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card. They all make me think about summer beach time and playing beach volleyball!
💻 SOME PAPERS I’M (TRYING!) TO READ THIS MONTH 👇
Rethinking Norm Psychology
Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.
Cecelia Heyes
Perspectives on Psychological Science (2023)
Adherence to emotion norms is greater in individualist cultures than in collectivist cultures
It is generally assumed that there is greater pressure to conform to social norms in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures. However, most research on cultural differences in social norms has examined norms for behaviors. Here, we examine cultural differences in norms for emotions. Relative to members of collectivist cultures, members of individualist cultures are more attuned to internal states and value them more. Therefore, we predicted that adherence to emotion norms would be greater in individualist than in collectivist cultures. In four studies with 119 samples from 69 distinct countries and over 200,000 participants, we estimated adherence to emotion norms in different cultures, and how deviation from emotion norms is associated with life satisfaction. As predicted, in countries higher in individualism, emotional experiences of individuals were more homogenous and more concordant with the emotions of others in their culture. Furthermore, in more individualist countries, deviation from the mean emotional experience was linked to lower life satisfaction. We discuss two complementary mechanisms that may underlie such differences.
Allon Vishkin, Shinobu Kitayama, Martha K Berg, Ed Diener, Daphna Gross-Manos, Asher Ben-Arieh, Maya Tamir
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2023)
📝 note from Cristina 📝
I post opportunities in the join us page of my lab website: https://sites.duke.edu/culturelab/join/. I am considering PhD students through Duke’s Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. I am also hoping to consider a post doc (posting will be listed on the site likely towards the end of the fall/beginning of spring).
💎 awesome work by Cristina 💎
Salvador, C.E., Idovro-Carlier, S., Ishii, K., Torres Castillo, C., Nanakdewa, K., Savani, K., San Martin, A. & Kitayama, S. (in press) Emotionally Expressive Interdependence in Latin America: Triangulating Through a Comparison of Three Cultural Regions. Emotion. https://psyarxiv.com/pw4yk/.
Kitayama, S. & Salvador, C.E. (2023) Cultural Psychology: Beyond East and West, Annual Review of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-021723- 063333
Kitayama, S., Salvador, C.E., Nanakdewa, K., Rossmaier, A., San Martin, A. & Savani, K. (2022) Varieties of Interdependence and the Emergence of the Modern West: Toward the Globalizing of Psychology. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001073.
AND THIS MONTH’S ROUND-UP 🤩
💎 awesome work by marginalia and affiliated scientists 💎
p.s. you can now also find these articles on our website
The construction of racial stereotypes and how they serve as racial propaganda
In social psychology, stereotypes have generally been viewed as overgeneralized beliefs about social groups in society. Although stereotypes—especially those that are negative—tend to be recognized as contributing to prejudice and discrimination of marginalized communities, they are often conceptualized as containing a “kernel of truth.” Meanwhile, there has been relatively little consideration of the historical and cultural origins of racial stereotypes. This is an important oversight given that stereotypes have and continue to be used as a means to excuse and reinforce the systemic oppression of communities of color. Thus, the current paper uses a historical framework to review major stereotypes that have targeted communities of color throughout U.S. history, with a focus on stereotypes of Black people. In doing so, we conceptualize racial stereotypes as propaganda that have historically functioned to support oppressive societal systems in the U.S. by both (a) shaping public perceptions and expectations and (b) by influencing the thoughts and behavior of members of stereotyped groups. By situating stereotypes within their historical and cultural frames, readers can recognize the way stereotypes reinforce systems of oppression. We conclude with research implications and encourage stereotyping scholars to foreground the social construction of stereotypes and the function that they serve by contextualizing their work in the social and historical context in which stereotypes emerged.
Arturia Melson-Silimon, Briana N. Spivey, & Allison L. Skinner-Dorkenoo
Social and Personality Psychology Compass (2023)
The puzzle of evaluating moral cognition in artificial agents
In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like-for-like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science.
Madeline G. Reinecke, Yiran Mao, Markus Kunesch, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, Julia Haas, & Joel Z. Leibo
Cognitive Science (2023)
👓 OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU 🚀
The UCSD Psychology department is hosting a two-day virtual event for all prospective students on October 20th & 21st - open to all.
application for the APSA diversity fellowship program (opening end of Sept 2023)
🌱 JOB-MARKET RESOURCES 🌱
no matter where you’re at right now -- offer in hand, fingers-still-crossed, looking at post-docs, exploring options outside academia -- we support you!
Boston College cluster hire in psychology, open-area tenure-track, as part of cluster hire with the African & African Diaspora Studies program (due Sept 24th)
Smith College tenure-track hire in cognitive psychology (review starts Oct 16th)
and, of course, feel free to email us with questions, ideas, etc to add to this list!
in support & science,
📚 MARGINALIA SCIENCE 📚
eliana hadjiandreou
ivy gilbert
jordan wylie
minjae kim