Dr. Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology, is the recipient of the 2014 Best Social Cognition Paper.
The International Social Cognition Network offers an award annually for the best social cognition paper. Dr. Gray co-authored the paper with Drs. David Rand of Yale University Department of Psychology, Eyal Ert of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of Agricultural Economics and Management, Kevin Lewis of the University of California San Diego Department of Sociology, and Steve Hershman and Michael Norton of Harvard University Business School.
They won for their paper, “The Emergence of ‘Us and Them’ in 80 Lines of Code: Modeling Group Genesis in Homogeneous Populations,” published in Psychological Science.
The award committee selected this paper for its decisive theoretical and methodological advancements for understanding social groups. Their research reveals that in the absence of different identities, stable groups form with only two simple conditions – transitivity and reciprocity. The committee felt the paper exemplifies the value of a social cognition approach for psychological research.
Dr. Gray and his co-authors’ work will be presented at the upcoming Social Cognition Pre-Conference on January 28, 2016.