Zoe Liberman
Associate Professor
Research Area
Developmental and Evolutionary Psychology Social Psychology
Biography
Zoe Liberman earned a B.S. in Psychology from Yale University (2011) and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago (2016). She then moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and an affiliate of the Department of Linguistics. Dr. Liberman's research focuses on the origins and development of social cognition, including how children reason about social categories and social relationships. Her work has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious CAREER award. She was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. She also contributes to the field through professional service, including serving on the editorial boards of several journals, such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and as Treasurer of the Cognitive Development Society.
Research
Zoe Liberman investigates the origins and development of human social cognition, with a focus on how people make sense of our complex social world. One major line of her work examines social categorization. She finds that, beginning in infancy, people expect others who share important attributes—such as a common language—to be similar to one another and to affiliate, suggesting that the ability to think about people as members of social categories is in place early in life. She also studies how the social environment shapes these expectations, including how growing up in a multilingual or otherwise diverse environment influences social categorization. Building on this foundation, her research follows how categorization develops across childhood and extends to a broader range of social domains, including how children reason about categories based on nationality, immigration status, race, and religion.
A second line of her work focuses on how people reason about social relationships. From infancy through childhood, she examines how people understand friendship, alliances, and loyalty—for example, how children use cues such as similarity, shared secrets, and resource sharing to infer who is friends with whom, and how social relationships shape judgments about gossip, trust, and moral behavior. Much of her research with children is conducted in partnership with local museums: Dr. Liberman and her students collaborate with MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation, and the Santa Barbara Zoo to study the developmental trajectory of reasoning about social categories and social relationships.
