Yarrow Dunham

Yarrow Dunham is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the director of the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale. He is also faculty in the Cognitive Science program and the Wu Tsai Institute, and is the Associate Faculty Director of the PRISE (Promising Research Informing Societal Equity) Center at Yale. He received BAs in philosophy and English literature from UC Santa Barbara and his doctorate in human development from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Yale he taught at UC Merced and Princeton. Yarrow’s research draws on cognitive, social, developmental, and cultural psychology with a particular focus on the acquisition of cultural knowledge in the context of social groups. Primary past foci have been social categorization (including stereotyping and prejudice) and fairness. Most recently a major interest has become the psychology of social constitution, i.e. the way in which social collectives give rise to genuinely new forms of life such embodied in “institutional kinds” such as money, borders, marriages, and promises.