Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, December 11 at 11 for Visiting Scholar David Sherman’s presentation, “Social Climate.”
Sherman is Professor of Social & Health Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s been part of the UC Santa Barbara faculty since 2003, and as a full professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences since 2014. Sherman holds a PhD and an MA in Psychology from Stanford University and a BA in Psychology from Cornell University. Among his honors and accomplishments, he became a Fellow at the Association for Psychological Science in 2021, and was President, International Society for Self and Identity, 2016-2018.
He was a Fellow at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2015 and winner of the 2014 Robert B. Cialdini Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for the publication that best “explicates social psychological phenomena principally through the use of field research methods and settings and that thereby demonstrates the relevance of the discipline to communities outside of academic social psychology within a given year,” (for Sherman et al., 2013, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). One of his main lines of research examines barriers to environmental sustainability. This research examines both sociocultural moderators of the link between beliefs, norms, and environmental behavior, as well as psychological barriers to support for policy related to climate change.
At RSF, he has been exploring the psychology of environmental decision making and support for policies addressing climate change. His current project includes insights from climate researchers, members of Congress, and climate activists while examining the systemic psychological and structural barriers that prevent political agreement on climate policy in the U.S. among individuals and policy makers.