Catherine Thomas

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Enculturating Behavioral Science for Development: Beyond the WEIRD, Independent Paradigm

Behavioral science is limited by its reliance on samples from individualist, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts. Its potential to accelerate development, poverty reduction, and wellbeing in the Global South is thus also limited. This project proposes to document psychological tendencies in motivation, cognition, self-concept, and emotion within sub-Saharan African settings and to link these tendencies to features of the socioecological context, specifically through a survey of experimental tasks and self-report measures in Kenya. The project aim is to productively diversify the behavioral science toolkit as well as build a more comprehensive science of human behavior.

Catherine Thomas, Department of Psychology

Catherine Thomas is a PhD candidate in social psychology and a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. Her research examines the application of social and cultural psychological insights to increase the effectiveness of anti-poverty policy in sub-Saharan Africa and the US, with a focus on the interplay of dignity, agency, and economic behavior. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed outlets including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in popular media outlets like Time Magazine. She graduated from Yale University with a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology and from the University of London with a MSc in Global Mental Health.

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