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Denise D. Cummins, PhD

Dr. Denise D. Cummins is cognitive scientist, author, and elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She has held faculty and research positions at Yale University, the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the Center for Adaptive Behavior at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.  In her Psychology Today blog and PBS NewHour articles, she writes about what she and other cognitive scientists are discovering about the way people think, solve problems, and make decisions.

Her experimental investigations focus on how perceived relative status impacts fairness in economic transactions, which factors influence people to decide to inflict harm on others, and how people decide what caused an event to happen or what can prevent an event from happening. 


Other Media (Click on titles to go to articles)

Yes, We Can Communicate With Animals, Scientific American, August 18, 2017


The Surprising Role of Fairness in Economic Decision-Making, Scientific American, July 25, 2016

The Fifth Way to Level the Playing Field in Science Chronicle of Higher Education, May 8, 2014

How fairness depends on your social status. Evolution: This View of Life, May, 2012.