Professor Michele Gelfand FBA

Summary

Michele J. Gelfand (b. 1967, USA) is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Professor of Psychology (by courtesy) at Stanford University; previously Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park (1996–2021).

She studied psychology at Colgate University (B.A., 1989) and received her Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996, where she studied under Harry Triandis.

Gelfand is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2021), fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), and member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2023).

She is past president of the International Association for Conflict Management, past division chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management, and past treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences for nations, organizations, and individuals.

She also examines global variation in negotiation, conflict, trust, revenge, and forgiveness. She has published over 200 scientific articles and chapters in outlets including Science, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour.

She is founding co-editor of the 'Advances in Culture and Psychology' series (Oxford University Press) and author of 'Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World' (Scribner, 2018).

Her work has been featured in The Guardian, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Economist, NBC News, and National Public Radio, among other outlets.