Dr. Joseph Uscinski is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. He studies public opinion and mass media, with a focus on conspiracy theories and related misinformation. He is co-author of American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, 2014) and editor of Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford, 2018). His textbook on conspiracy theories is Conspiracy Theories: A Primer. More»
Dr. Laurence Kirmayer is James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, and editor-in-chief emeritus of Transcultural Psychiatry. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Jewish General Hospital where he conducts research on the mental health of Aboriginal peoples, mental health services for immigrants and refugees, and the cultural basis of psychiatric theory and practice. For 2021-2023, he is the President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. He is the editor of Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care. More»
Dr. Belén López-Pérez is a Lecturer in Psychology at The University of Manchester. She concluded her PhD in Social psychology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2012, and her Postdoctoral research in Social and Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at Plymouth University. Her research interests include empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation across the lifespan, as well as happiness and well-being. More»
Dr. Alessandra Cassar is a Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. She is the Vice-President for North America of the Economic Science Association. Her current research concentrates on the under-studied areas of female competitiveness; the consequences of conflict and disaster victimization for altruism, trust, religiosity, risk, and time preferences; and the role of social networks for economic outcomes. More»
Dr. Mitch Brown is an instructor and researcher in Psychology at the University of Arkansas. His research uses complementary social and evolutionary perspectives in understanding how fundamental social motives shape social perceptions and interpersonal preferences. This work primarily considers (1) the tradeoffs people invoke to avoid disease and belong to groups, (2) the prioritization of physical features and behaviors in shaping preferences for short-term and long-term mates, and (3) how inferences of men’s formidability inform stereotypes of personality and social functions. From an increasingly applied standpoint, his research considers how evolutionary motives impede fair treatment of individuals under the U.S. Constitution. More»
Dr. Quentin Atkinson is a Professor in Psychology at the University of Auckland, where he runs the Language, Cognition and Culture Lab, and co-Director of the University of Auckland Behavioural Insights Exchange (UoABIX). He uses lab and field experiments, computer modelling and evolutionary theory to shed light on the evolution of human culture and cognition. This work answers questions including the origins of linguistic diversity, the function of religion, the psychology of climate change, how evolved cognitive biases shape our social behavior and why political systems vary the way they do around the globe. More»
Dr. Donald Hoffman is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. He is the author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. More»
Dr. Jerome Wakefield is a Professor at NYU Silver as well as an NYU University Professor with multidisciplinary appointments, particularly affiliate faculty in Philosophy and affiliate faculty in Bioethics. Dr. Wakefield’s scholarly specialty is the conceptual foundations of clinical theory. Much of his recent work has concerned the concept of mental disorder, especially how normal negative responses to a problematic social environment can be distinguished from mental disorder and how DSM diagnostic criteria fail to adequately draw this distinction. He’s the author of several books, including The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder, and All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders. More»
Dr. Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Dr. Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He is the author of seven books, including his latest Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. More»
Dr. Francesca Righetti is an Associate Professor at the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at the VU Amsterdam. Dr. Righetti’s research focuses on close relationships. More specifically she studies sacrifice, ambivalence, and how dual processes shape relationship dynamics (e.g., implicit partner evaluations, self-control, automatic processes). Besides obtaining several grants (e.g., the VENI, ORA, and VIDI grants from NWO), she has also won several awards such as the Caryl Rusbult Early Career Award from Relationship Researchers Interest Group (RRIG), the Early Career Award from the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP) and the Raising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). More»
