Ziva Kunda

Ziva Kunda (June 13, 1955 – February 24, 2004) was a social psychologist well known for her work in social cognition and motivated reasoning as well as the textbook, Social Cognition: Making Sense of People. She was born in Tel Aviv.

Kunda was born in Tel Aviv in 1955. Her parents were from Oudtshoorn, a small South African town. They immigrated from different parts of Europe to Oudtshoorn to find safety from the persecutions of Jews before and during World War II. In Kunda's autobiography, she shares her parents' background, their parents, and her early childhood.

Kunda obtained her PhD and MA in Psychology in 1985 at the University of Michigan, and her BA in Psychology at the University of Jerusalem in 1978. Directly after finishing her PhD, she became an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Psychology Department. In 1992, she moved to Waterloo, Ontario, where she was Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. In 1997, she became a full Professor. Kunda's profile on the Social Psychology Network is actively maintained by social psychologist Scott Plous, in order to provide a resource for those interested in Kunda's work.

In 1999, Kunda authored the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People; one of the books she is well known for. In this book, Kunda begins by painting a picture of the birth of social psychology and cognitive psychology. Before the prominence of these fields, psychology was dominated by behavioral psychology which focused on studying only observable human behavior; B. F. Skinner's "black box" framed any internal happenings of the human mind as an enigma that should not be explored. However, Kunda highlights in the book how, with the rise of the study of cognition in the 1950s and beyond due to the increase of technological research tools (fMRI, EEG, etc), cognitive scientists began to break down the barriers to understanding human cognition. Kunda covers many topics in the book, from stereotyping and emotional effects on cognition to judgements and behavior. She points out that the topic of social cognition, unique in that most humans have interacted with other humans and therefore have many personal experiences with this research field, collects many presumptions from "lay people" and psychologists alike. Kunda therefore emphasizes not only what the theories of social cognition are, but also how the theories and empirical findings were developed to highlight efficacy.

Kunda wrote as an overview of her research:

One line of my work examines how stereotypes are activated, used, and modified. Under what circumstances, for example, will the stereotypes of an ethnic or an occupational group come to mind as one is interacting with a member of these groups? How will a person's behavior influence which of the stereotypes relevant to that person are on one's mind? Under what circumstances will relevant stereotypes influence one's evaluation of a person? Another line of my work examines how outstanding individuals influence people's self-views and motivation. When will a superstar give rise to inspiration and self-enhancement, and when to discouragement and self-deflation?

This contextual understanding of how people stereotype added a new dimension to this body of work. Specifically, Kunda's work with Stephen Spencer looked at temporal aspects of stereotyping in their paper "When Do Stereotypes Come to Mind and When Do They Color Judgment?" They found that when someone is engaging with another individual in a stereotyped group, that person is not always thinking about the group's stereotype. When they do think about the stereotype, the stereotype does not always play a role in their judgements. Kunda also found that when stereotypes change, they usually do so incrementally or through causal reasoning.

Her paper "The Case for Motivated Reasoning", published in Psychological Bulletin in 1990, posthumously received the Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. In this paper, Kunda describes how, when reasoning, humans usually arrive at the conclusion they want to, but this is limited by whether or not they are able to provide justifications for this conclusion. She highlights the danger if, instead of taking this self-affirming bias into account, we perceive our own and others' reasoning as objective. Finally, she notes that truly objective reasoning is often needed to explore the full range of possible outcomes.

In 2004, Kunda died from cancer. She is survived by her husband Paul Thagard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, and two sons.