Niobe Way
Professor of Applied Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University, USAAbout the author:
In addition to being Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University, I am Past President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), which is a think and do tank at NYU aimed at drawing from the science. At the broadest level, I study the intersections of human development in culture and context. My focus, more specifically, is on the social and emotional development of adolescents and the ways in which the micro (e.g., families, peers, and schools) and macro-level (e.g., cultural ideologies, stereotypes, and values) contexts shape their developmental trajectories in the U.S. and in China.
What I want to achieve:
At the micro level, I would like my research to inspire the field of psychology to include more regularly macro level factors such as cultural ideologies (i.e., privileging the individual over relationships; norms of masculinity) in their studies of human development and human behavior. At the macro level, I would like my research and similar such research to change how we, as researchers and practitioners, understand the nature of our social and educational problems and how we go about fixing them. The emerging body of the science of human connection, of which my research is a part, tells a new story about who we are as humans and what disrupts our humanity as well as how to address the disruption and create a more just and humane world. We need to draw from the story coming the sciences to help children more effectively and adolescents and their families thrive.