Susan Birch, PhD Yale
Associate Professor
Faculty of Arts
Dept. of Psychology
Vancouver Campus
Fields
Children and Babies, Developmental / Behaviour, Early Childhood Education, Human Relationships
Contact Information
phone: 604-822-3994
Alternate Contact
Erik Rolfsen
Senior Media Relations Specialist
Tel: 604.822.2644
Cell: 604.209.3048
Email: erik.rolfsen@ubc.ca
Expertise
Social perspective taking, social learning, social cognition, imitation, nonverbal behavior, confidence, communication, decision-making, impression formation, child development, the study of children and adults’ social perspective taking abilities (i.e., their abilities to reason about other peoples’ mental states–their intentions, knowledge, and beliefs) and how their abilities to take another person’s perspective impacts how they form impressions of others, learn from others, communicate with others, and informs a range of socials. Of particular interest is a) how children make inferences about what is credible information to learn (e.g., how they decide whether someone is a credible source of information based on how confident that person seems) and b) how a widespread bias in perspective taking referred to as ‘the curse of knowledge bias’ (a difficulty reasoning about a more naive perspective as the result of being biased by one’s current knowledge) can impair communication (both written and in person) and decision-making across a range of fields (politics, law, education, economics, medicine, etc.)