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Geoffrey Cohen

 

 Geoffrey Cohen is currently both an associate professor in psychology at University of Colorado, Boulder, and the James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business at Stanford University.  A social psychologist by training, he received his PH.D. at Stanford University.  Geoff has a long-standing interest in social problems and social policy.  The combination of this interest and his scholarly activity in psychology led to an enduring interest in bridging theory and intervention. The aim of much of his research is the development of theory-driven, rigorously tested intervention strategies that further our understanding of the processes underpinning social problems and that offer solutions to alleviate them.   Two key questions lie at the core of his research: “Given that a problem exists, what are its underlying processes?” And, “Once identified, how can these processes be overcome?”

Currently he is studying several topics.  These include the problem of under-performance, with special emphasis on the racial achievement gap; inter-group conflict; aggression and health-risk behavior; and hiring discrimination. Much of his work focuses on how such problems are tied to people’s efforts to maintain identity and create positive social meanings for their behavior.

In a series of field experiments, including two reports published in Science, he and his colleagues have illustrated how brief identity-reinforcing interventions can have long-term effects on people’s psychological well-being and intellectual performance.  One series of experiments found that having minority children affirm a positive identity, by writing about their most important values in a series of structured writing assignments, consistently improved their school grades.  This closed the achievement gap with their White peers, with the effect evident two years later.

This research has led Geoff to an interest in how psychological processes perpetuate themselves over long periods of time in recursive cycles.  It has also reinforced for him the value of a tradition started by Kurt Lewin, the father of experimental social psychology, in which the development of theory and application go hand-in-hand. Finally, the use of rigorous laboratory experiments, and equally rigorous field experiments, provides the continuing basis of his methodological approach.

Geoffrey Cohen's web pages: 
~ Stanford University: http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/faculty/displayRecord.php?suid=glc
~ University of Colorado at Boulder: http://psych.colorado.edu/~gcohen/


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