Whose Minds Matter?

Join the webinar: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/98926078094

Since the cognitive revolution, psychology has shifted its research focus toward conducting primarily “basic” research studies in laboratory and other non-naturalistic settings with convenience samples that enable us to isolate mechanisms of interest. While this shift in research approach has expedited the rate of discovery in one sense, the shift away from studying naturally occurring behavior in a variety of settings with diverse groups of people has created a tension—it has limited both what we have been able to learn and our ability to apply our findings to contemporary problems in the world. In this talk I will use examples from research on education, health, and environmental disparities to discuss the implications of our sampling strategies for the advancement of psychological theory. I will then conclude by discussing the implications of our methodological practices for the application of psychological theories in the modern world.

Neil Lewis, Jr. is a behavioral and intervention scientist at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine, where he is an assistant professor in the department of communication, division of general internal medicine, and graduate field of psychology. Lewis's research examines how people's social contexts and identities influence: (1) how they interpret and make meaning of the world around them, (2) their motivation to pursue their goals and success in goal pursuit efforts, and (3) the implications of these processes for individual and collective outcomes in education, health, and environmental sustainability. He is particularly interested in these processes as they relate to broader inequities in society, as well as their implications for the effectiveness of interventions and policies to improve equity in social outcomes.