About

Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her research employs field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Gelfand's work has been published in prominent outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behavior, and others. She is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series and authored the book 'Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World' published in 2018. Her contributions to the field have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Diener award from SPSP, the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, and the Contributions to Society award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Social Science
• Public relations
• Computer Science
• Law
• Engineering
• Virology
• Psychiatry
• Nursing
• Data Mining
• Internal medicine
• Biology
• Socioeconomics
• Ecology
• Environmental health
• Data science
• Pathology
• Environmental ethics
• Neuroscience
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Social consequences of counternormative behavior: The Violation Appraisal Response (VAR) model

  Advances in experimental social psychology · 2026-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Conflict Changes How People View God

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Religion shapes the nature of intergroup conflict, but conflict may also shape religion. Here, we report four multimethod studies that reveal the impact of conflict on religious belief: The threat of warfare and intergroup tensions increase the psychological need for order and obedience to rules, which leads people to view God as more punitive. Studies 1 (<em>N</em> = 372) and 2 (<em>N</em> = 911) showed that people's concern about conflict correlates with belief in a punitive God. Study 3 (<em>N</em> = 1,065) found that experimentally increasing the salience of conflict increases people's perceptions of the importance of a punitive God, and this effect is mediated by people's support for a tightly regulated society. Study 4 showed that the severity of warfare predicted and preceded worldwide fluctuations in punitive-God belief between 1800 CE and 2000 CE. Our findings illustrate how conflict can change the nature of religious belief and add to a growing literature showing how cultural ecologies shape psychology.

  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum: Conflict Changes How People View God (Psychological Science, (2020), 31, 3, (280–292), 10.1177/0956797619895286)

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Corrigendum to "Conflict Changes How People View God"

  PublisherDOI

• Evolving patterns of gender inequality over time and across countries: new theoretical perspectives and an emerging research agenda

  Journal of International Business Studies · 2025-08-09 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Significance loss as the rhetoric of extreme ideologies: Evidence from the political and the terroristic context

  Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  • Mussolini's fascist speeches emphasized honor loss more than democratic leaders’ rhetoric, which focused on honor gain. • Democratic speeches included more honor-related words overall, underscoring collective values like unity and progress, while fascist rhetoric leveraged feelings of national humiliation to mobilize support. • Writings by lone-actor religious terrorists contained significantly more honor loss words than those of political terrorists. • Religious extremist rhetoric showed a pronounced focus on grievance and perceived dishonor, consistent with narratives of existential threat. • Innovative Methodology : A custom Python-based approach applied the Honor Dictionary to analyze linguistic markers in texts, providing transparency and reproducibility. • Practical Implications : The study highlights the potential for counter-narratives targeting extremist rhetoric by addressing honor-related grievances and offering alternative pathways for significance restoration. • Novel Contribution : This is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary as a linguistic measure to explore the psychological mechanisms of extremist ideologies across political and religious contexts. Drawing on the Significance Quest Theory ( Kruglanski et al., 2022 ), we used the Honor Dictionary (Gelfand et al., 2015) in a word frequency textual analysis (Pennebaker et al., 2007) to investigate extreme rhetoric. We thus conducted two studies. The first, investigating the political context, compared speeches of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1918–1945, N = 284) with those of democratic Presidents of the Italian Republic (1949–2006, N = 901). The second, focused on lone-actors terrorists, examined texts from the Extremist Manifesto Database (EMD, Grigoryan et al., 2023) and compared writings by terrorists driven by political ideologies (left & right-wing, ethno-nationalists, and anti-government, N = 65) with those of terrorists motivated by religious ideologies ( N = 23). Notably, we hypothesized and found that, compared to democratic rhetoric, fascist rhetoric contained (a) more words expressing feelings of lost honor and (b) fewer words reflecting gaining honor. Moreover, as expected, we found that lone-actor religious terrorists' rhetoric, compared to lone-actor political terrorists, contained more words expressing feelings of lost honor and fewer words expressing honor gain. Notably, this is the first research to use the Honor Dictionary to linguistically measure the activation of the need for significance, demonstrating a strong correlation with the endorsement of extreme ideologies. Further, our research supports the hypothesis that extreme rhetoric reflects–and aims to induce–significance loss feelings.

  PublisherDOI

• Culture

  2025-05-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  The term, culture, appears in many contexts of discourse–from food, clothing, and general mores of peoples around the world to characteristics of a workplace, consumers, and politics. The popularity of the culture concept in common parlance today belies its checkered history in psychology.

  PublisherDOI

• &lt;p&gt;Evolving Patterns of Gender Inequality Over Time and Across Countries: New Theoretical Perspectives and an Emerging Research Agenda&lt;/p&gt;

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• From local knowledge to global patterns: a cross-cultural study of the dimensions of hazards and adaptive capacity

  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · 2025-12-05

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern. While there is a plethora of research on climate adaptation, the literature is highly fragmented, and empirical studies are rarely carried out with global samples. This lack of comparative work limits our ability to understand general patterns in how societies adapt, thereby impeding effective policy and practice at a wider scale. To fill this gap, we outline a global comparative approach to the study of hazards that uses ethnographic data. The approach operationalizes five ecological dimensions of environmental hazards, including event type, frequency, onset speed, predictability, and severity, and investigates how they relate across a world-wide sample of 132 nonindustrial societies with significant variation in time and space. We then utilize this approach to explore how specific ecological dimensions might influence the adaptive capacity of societies to respond to events. Findings uncover generalizable patterns that exist across our global sample, suggesting that predictability enhances adaptive capacity, while temporal factors that promote uncertainty (including slow onset speed, longer event duration, and unpredictability) limit the success of adaptation efforts.

  PublisherDOI

• Culture &amp; personality: Five expert visions

  Personality Science · 2025-02-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Research on culture and personality has greatly enhanced personality science by bringing attention to the bidirectional processes by which socio-cultural factors shape personality and individuals in turn shape their social environments to fit and express their personalities. This review showcases the unique perspectives and topical contributions of five different sets of experts, who examine these issues from different standpoints and answer different questions. Specifically, these contributions focus on (1) the usefulness of anthropology-based distributive models of culture, (2) how culture and personality make-up each other, (3) the cultural and ecological basis of wellbeing, (4) how individual personality expressions relate to culture, and (5) the multicultural mind and self. These advances put personality psychology at the center of important current social science debates about the dynamic interplay between macro-level factors and individual variables, and how individuals can best manage cultural diversity and globalization.

  PublisherDOI

• The Social Class Gap in Negotiation

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  A class ceiling persists in organizations: People from a lower social class are often paid less than those from a higher social class, despite having comparable credentials. In this research, we argue that one factor contributing to this class ceiling is class differences in the propensity to negotiate. Specifically, we posit that lower-class individuals are less inclined to initiate negotiations than their higher-class counterparts, a tendency associated with adverse economic outcomes. We provide empirical support (total N = 11,344) for this hypothesis through field data from a nationally representative sample of employees (Study 1) and an MBA student sample (Study 2), a field study of an online labor market (Study 3), and a survey about workplace negotiation (Study 4). We find that this class gap in negotiation propensity is explained by differences in sense of power and concerns about social backlash. A final experiment among HR professionals in charge of recruiting and hiring shows that the concerns of lower-class individuals reflect realistic perceptions of differential treatment (Study 5): Negotiation incurs a greater social backlash for lower-class than higher-class individuals. We discuss implications for future research connecting social class and negotiation and for organizational efforts to address class disparities.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Cultural Tightness-Looseness

  NSF · $123k · 2000–2004

Frequent coauthors

• Arie W. Kruglanski

  41 shared

• Joshua Conrad Jackson

  26 shared

• Lisa M. Leslie

  New York University

  22 shared

• Ryan Fehr

  Seattle University

  18 shared

• Jocelyn J. Bélanger

  16 shared

• Chi‐yue Chiu

  15 shared

• Munqith Dagher

  15 shared

• Shihui Han

  Peking University

  15 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of Maryland, College Park

Awards & honors

• 2016 Diener award from SPSP
• 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the A…
• 2019 Outstanding Cultural Psychology Award from the Society…
• 2020 Rubin Theory-to-Practice award from the International A…
• 2021 Contributions to Society award from the Organizational…