Daphna R. Oyserman

Professor Oyserman (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daphna.oyserman) is jointly appointed to the School of Social Work, the Department of Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research. Honors include being a W.T. Grant Faculty Scholar (1995-2000), a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (2009-10), and a Humbolt Prize recipient (awarded 2009). She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. She was a consulting editor for both Developmental Psychology and Social Work Research. She twice received the Society for Social Work Research Best Scholarly Contribution Award (2004,2009) for her research on racial identity and its consequences for academic outcomes and health; her 2002 synthesis of research on cultural psychology is considered a citation classic of the ISI Web of Science (honored as a "Hot Topic in Psychology/Psychiatric" in July 2002 as the fastest increasing citation impact of that year, and again in January 2004 as a "Top 3 Hot Papers Published in the Last Three Years for Psychology/Psychiatry"). Professor Oyserman is internationally known for her research on self, culture, and motivation, which she conducts within a situated cognition framework. Using experimental and field-based methods, she explores how culture and identity shape, and are shaped by, individuals and contexts, with a particular emphasis on identity-based motivation and its cognitive and behavioral consequences. Her work shows how cultural mindsets and identities can be usefully engaged to improve important life outcomes, including academic performance, mental and physical health. Her work also demonstrates when these mindsets and identities are likely to undermine rather than bolster goal pursuit, resulting in less effort in school and more felt temptation to procrastinate or engage in goal-undermining behaviors.