Dacher Keltner - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cultural Psychology is the study of how culture influences human thought, feeling, and action, as well as how humans create culture and societies. Interest in Cultural Psychology has expanded dramatically in recent years, and has generated increasingly mature theories, methods, and empirical knowledge bases germane to most areas of Psychology. We propose to augment the specialized training that pre-doctoral students receive in the chosen fields of Psychology with broad exposure to Cultural Psychology. In this application for five years of support, we propose to select three pre-doctoral students per year to participate in a two-year training sequence. Trainees will participate in a year-long core seminar, a journal seminar devoted to contemporary topics in Cultural Psychology, an interdisciplinary course breadth requirement, interactions with leading figures in Cultural Psychology, specialized methodology workshops, and an annual workshop. These different activities will focus on the interplay between culture and basic psychological processes in five areas of research: Cognition and Cognitive Development; Emotion and Socio-emotional Development; Individual Differences, Self, and Personality; Language and Language Development; and Social Interactions, Social Behavior, and Relationships. Trainees will interact extensively with Berkeley faculty who have active, longstanding cross-national research programs, and affiliated faculty with substantial expertise in Cultural Psychology drawn from other Bay Area universities. Close mentoring and monitoring of trainee progress will be maintained throughout. We hope to foster an appreciation and understanding of the theories, methods, and data of the different areas of Cultural Psychology, thus laying the groundwork for better communication among sub-specialties and a more incremental science of culture. Training students in Cultural Psychology also has important social benefits, which derive in part from the implications research in Cultural Psychology has for diverse problems, including: (a) cognitive processes that underpin cultural understanding and misunderstanding; (b) cultural influences on the etiology and expression of physical and mental illness and health; (c) educational policy and practices that concern cultural issues (e.g., bilingualism, academic success, acculturation); (d) relationship discord and satisfaction within and across ethnic groups; and (e) developing a science of Psychology that is concerned with the psychology of individuals of different cultural backgrounds.

Psychological research has traditionally been conducted using laboratory experiments, bringing a small number of people into a research laboratory and asking them to complete a task. But the existence--and increasing availability--of online datasets on human behavior and new technologies for data collection suggests a different approach might be possible: mining large databases for clues about how people reason, learn, and interact. Dr. Griffiths, Dr. Gopnik, and Dr. Keltner will establish a research center at the University of California, Berkeley to explore the potential of this data-intensive approach to psychological science. The research center will work with a network of researchers across the country and companies developing technologies for collection of behavioral data to establish pilot projects in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. These pilot projects will include examining what online databases reveal about human reasoning, how mobile devices can be used to study how children learn, and whether interactions on social networking websites can answer questions about human emotion.

"Big data" research is currently dominated by computer scientists and statisticians, but the questions that are often the focus of this research "understanding human behavior" have traditionally been the domain of psychologists. The new research center for data-intensive psychological science will bring these groups together by establishing collaborations between researchers and developing a curriculum for training students to work at the intersection of these disciplines. The results will be potentially transformative for psychological research, taking it out of the laboratory and into the world. By asking questions that are motivated by decades of psychological theory, data-intensive psychological research will provide new insights into analyzing large behavioral datasets that are potentially relevant to any research project or commercial enterprise that relies upon this kind of data.