Social and Cultural Psychology

Overview

The discipline of social and cultural psychology is broadly centred on understanding the ways in which culture and society shape how people think, behave and relate to one another.

In the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS), our international experts come from multidisciplinary backgrounds to approach and draw on theories, concepts and methods to tackle the pressing issues of today, including a strong focus on inequality, the Global South, and responses to global emergencies.

Experts in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science work across the following broad themes and topics:

Cognition
Human development under adversity and conflict
Global emergencies
Community development
Health and science communication
Individual and social decision-making
Perfectionism
Cultural and societal change
WEIRD psychology

Our research is anchored in a shared evidence-based approach that is theoretically informed and policy relevant.

Expertise in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science

Dr Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir

Visiting Fellow

Key areas of expertise: Helping; identity; migration; religion; meta-science; social identity; bystander intervention; intergroup relations; prosocial behaviour; altruism; charitable donations.

Dr Deema Awad

LSE Fellow

Key areas of expertise: Contextual effects; group perception; person perception; ensemble perception; crowding; eye gaze perception; emotion; facial familiarity; age perception; psychophysics; eye tracking.

Professor Martin Bauer

Key areas of expertise: Public understanding and public engagement; rhetoric and science communication; resistance and critical innovation studies; public opinion; common sense; conspiracy mentality; mass media monitoring and text analysis.

Dr Thomas Curran

Associate Professor

Key areas of expertise: Perfectionism; mental health; research methods; statistics.

Dr Natalia Concha

Visiting Fellow

Key areas of expertise: sociocultural psychology; psychosocial approaches; mothering; maternal health; family and cultural dynamics; youth development; peace building; Colombia; Latin America.

Professor Bradley Franks

Key areas of expertise: Cognition and culture; evolutionary perspectives; categorisation and concepts; conspiracy theory; agency; self-construal; religion.

Professor Alex Gillespie

Key areas of expertise: Communication; misunderstandings; culture; perspective taking; listening; dialogue.

Dr Ilka Gleibs

Associate Professor

Key areas of expertise: Social identity dynamics; effect of mergers on group identities; how social identity can affect well-being; impact of multiple social identities on well-being and performance; social identity dynamics in leadership; ethics of online research.

Professor Sandra Jovchelovitch

Key areas of expertise: Social and community development; human development under contextual adversity; social representations; socio-cultural psychology of community; public sphere; Latin America.

Dr Jens Madsen

Assistant Professor

Key areas of expertise: Belief revision, cognitive psychology, computational models.

Dr Michael Muthukrishna

Associate Professor

Key areas of expertise: Assimilation; behavioural sciences; corruption; cross-cultural psychology; cultural and social change; data science; democracy; economic psychology; entrepreneurship; human evolution; innovation; intelligence; multiculturalism; cultural evolution.

Dr Cathy Nicholson

Visiting Fellow

Key areas of expertise: Intergroup conflict; intergroup boundaries; political narratives; collective memory; contact research; social representations; dialogical interdependencies; qualitative methodology.

Dr Celestin Okoroji

Visiting Fellow

Key areas of expertise: Identity threat; stigma; Social Identity Theory; Social Representations Theory; stereotype threat; welfare benefits; unemployment.

Dr Maria Cecilia Dedios Sanguineti

Research Officer

Key areas of expertise: Mixed methods; moral development; cultural psychology; theories on psycho-social development in poverty contexts.

Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

Associate Professor

Key areas of expertise: Political psychology; intergroup relations & conflict; behavioural economics of poverty; Inequality & social stratification; power & status; evolutionary psychology.