Interests:  Although I have interests in many areas of psychology, many of those interests have combined to lead me into the area of Social Psychology. One of those interests is how we construct our identity in relation to the groups we belong to and how our self-identity influences certain behaviours in our life. One order of behaviours that I have a long-standing interest in is addictions (of all types). This is the area I worked in for my Honours thesis. The interest in addictions relates to my present interests in groups and identity in that I am curious about the roles self-identity and group based identities play in determining who becomes  and who does not become an addict among the many people who dabble in the behaviours that are so destructive for a few.

Email: josephc@sfu.ca

Curriculum Vitae

Gregory Boese

Interests:  I received my MA degree from the University of Manitoba in 2012 and am currently a PhD student in Social Psychology at Simon Fraser University. Within the framework of social psychology, my interests generally concern intergroup relations and prosocial behavior. Across several lines of research, I apply theory and methods from psychology to understand the behavioural foundations of various social issues such as intergroup reconciliation, global poverty alleviation, and charitable giving.

 Email: gboese@sfu.ca 
 Twitter: @gregboese 

Odilia Dys-Steenbergen

Interests:  My past work as an outreach worker led to my passion for social equality and social justice.  This, in turn, inspired me to study positive cross-group interactions using a Social Identity approach. As part of my Honours and Masters I developed a theoretical framework examining the role of motivation, specifically self-expansion motivation, in positive cross-ethnic interactions. For my dissertation I hope to expand on this framework by examining different intergroup relations (age, gender and status), while considering the various boundary conditions of self-expansion motivation in cross-group interactions and testing multiple intrapersonal, interpersonal and intergroup outcomes. I am also very interested in issues related to morality, gender inequality, poverty and immigration as well as how social psychology can inform public policy.

Email: odysstee@sfu.ca

Curriculum Vitae

Ziv Levin

Interests: I'm a third year PhD student in the IRSJ lab. I received my BA in psychology and sociology from the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo in 2011, my group facilitation diploma from the School for Peace in 2014, my MA in social psychology from Tel Aviv University in 2015, and my academic teaching certificate from Simon Fraser University in 2017. Across my work, I aim to turn "messy" group processes that can be observed in conflict-centered dialogue settings into independently testable predictions and individually-administered interventions in the lab. My interests include the politicization of identity, the motivated mechanisms of denial of and indifference to suffering, and group-level emotional attributions and meta-attributions.

Email: zlevin@sfu.ca