Deborah Prentice Addresses Behavior Change as a Psychological Enterprise in a Lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study
Solving societal problems involves changing people's behavior-inducing them to drink less, exercise more, turn down the heat, stay in school and so on. Interventions designed to change these behaviors have met with limited success. Deborah Prentice, Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, will discuss "Behavior Change as a Psychological Enterprise" on Wednesday, February 25, at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Dr. Prentice, who is a Visiting Professor in the Institute's School of Social Science for the 2008-09 academic year, will underscore how a closer look at interventions and their effect on people's thoughts, feelings and motivations reveals why some succeed and others fail. She will also suggests strategies for improving these outcomes.
Dr. Prentice studies the psychological underpinnings of group life: How people pursue individual ends within collective contexts and how collectives shape individual realities. Much of Dr. Prentice's research has focused on gender, and in particular, on the ways in which beliefs and conventions regarding gender serve to reproduce and sustain gender differences and divisions. She has also studied several aspects of college student life, including the social dynamics of alcohol use, identity construction through extracurricular participation, and, currently, psychological and experiential factors that contribute to persistence in college. Her current research also includes projects on how essentialist beliefs shape intergroup relations and on emotional reactions to norm violations.
After earning her undergraduate degree in human biology and music from Stanford University in 1984, Dr. Prentice was awarded her M.S. (1986), M. Phil. (1987) and Ph.D. (1989) in Psychology from Yale University. She served as assistant professor (1989-95) and associate professor (1995-2000) in the department of psychology at Princeton University before becoming professor (2000) and department chair (2002). In 2008, she was named the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Psychology.
Dr. Prentice is the author of numerous articles and has edited two books, Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict (with D. T. Miller, 1999) and Perspectivism in Social Psychology: The Yin and Yang of Scientific Progress (with J. T. Jost and M. R. Banaji, 2004). She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations and others. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and is a member of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the International Society for Self and Identity, and other professional associations. In addition to several prestigious fellowships, Dr. Prentice is the recipient of the 1994 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.