There’s no such thing as a culture-free human, according to Dorsa Amir, the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience’s newest assistant professor.
Born in Tehran, Amir’s family moved to the United States when she was seven. That personal experience informs many of Amir’s professional questions about how culture shapes who we are and how we act — and especially how that process plays out in childhood development.
“I think part of my interest in culture is because I'm a first-generation immigrant. I never assumed that ‘this is just what people are like’ and then was surprised when other cultures did things differently,” she said. “I understood early on that cultures were important, and that they shaped how you think and behave.”
While pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale University, Amir completed equal parts of coursework in both anthropology and psychology, blending the two complementary fields in an effort to contextualize human behavior and understand how it's shaped by culture.
“People tend to distinguish between ‘psychology’ and ‘cultural psychology’ — but it's all, in some way, cultural psychology,” she said.
For Amir, the two integral puzzle pieces for understanding humans are culture and development. “The study of human development is so important for the human species,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s a little under-recognized in the behavioral sciences.”
“Human development is unique because we have an incredibly long period of dependence: childhood. It’s this special protected time of provisioning when people need to take care of you, and you’re learning how to integrate information and practice it — and growing into the person that you're going to become.”
Amir’s research prompts the question: What are the aspects of human development that are consistent across diverse cultures — and what things vary?
As a cross-cultural developmental psychologist, Amir does this by working with children in-person — and sometimes online — from the United States and around the globe, conducting cognitive tests in the form of interactive games. “It's deceptively simple, but I really enjoy interacting with kids through these games,” she said. “It’s a chance to observe behaviors and uncover important things about human nature.”
Amir’s research has uncovered a surprising amount of cultural variation influencing the development of the children she’s interacted with. Since 2014, she’s worked with the Shuar people, an Indigenous community in the Amazon. Amir believes that including communities like the Shuar in research studies is important for our understanding of human psychology.
“A lot of psychology research tends to focus on a subset of a subset of people — typically, affluent kids near university towns,” she said. “That’s not bad — we're learning a lot about how behavior develops and how children make decisions in these populations, but what else can we learn by expanding the population pool and thinking more broadly? Not just about psychology in these populations, but about human psychology as a whole?”
With the establishment of her new Mind and Culture Lab, Amir is looking forward to working with undergraduate researchers in the lab and in the classroom, where she’ll be teaching Introduction to Developmental Psychology.
“I'm very excited to teach,” she said, noting what she calls her “twist” on the intro course’s focus.
“Culture tends to be a sub-topic within psychology, and I really want to give it a lot more attention,” she shared. “Instead of culture being one chapter in the psychology textbook, I want it to become the frame through which we understand all the other chapters.”
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience