Lawrence A. HIRsCHFELD

The Lab Director. Lawrence Hirschfeld is a professor of anthropology and of psychology. He received his doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in Social Psychology and at the Laboratoire de psychobiologie de l’enfant in Paris in Developmental Psychology. Before joining the NSSR faculty in 2005, he taught many years at the University of Michigan. His research has focused on cognitive development, revealing preschoolers’ surprisingly adult-like beliefs about social categories such as race, ethnicity, and gender. Current research extends this earlier work by exploring parallel but precursor capacities for group-based reasoning among infants and toddlers. He is author of Race in The Making: Cognition, Culture and The Child’s Construction of Human Kinds (MIT Press) and co-edited Mapping The Mind: Domain Specifity In Cognition and Culture (Cambridge U. Press) and Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference (Erbaum Publ.)

Busra yaman

The Lab Manager. Busra is a second year MA student in Psychology at NSSR. She received her BA degree from Bogazici University. Before joining NSSR, she worked at several London universities as a research assistant and tutored Maths in London. She is currently the research assistant and the lab manager at Infant and Toddler lab.

gen tsudaka

One way people make sense of and integrate social reality is by essentializing self and others while building structures that support and maintain it; we refer to these as self-, social-, and cultural identities. Another way, but lesser explored, is how symbolic place (as opposed to physical space) harbors distinctive meaning and identity and even, I claim, modes of thinking that transcend attributes by organizing around shared telos.

Given the impact of place that's had on life, my interest, particularly in this lab, is developing and exploring the theory-of-place as a cognitive primitive to a) extend and address theoretical gaps in the theory-of-mind literature, and b) advocating for different types of socialization to address issues of increasing group polarization and declining capitals of social trust and empathy. [for more: gentsudaka.com]