Jay Van Bavel is a Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, where he is leading the Social Identity and Morality Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), at the department of strategy and management. In his position at NHH, he is closely connected to the grant project “Freedom to Choose”, led by Hallgeir Sjåstad and Alexander Cappelen.

Jay is the co-author of “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. Prior to joining NYU, Jay completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Ohio State University.

From neurons to social networks, Jay’s research examines how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the mind, brain, and behavior. His work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, implicit bias, moral judgment, decision-making, and social media. He studies these issues using a combination of neuroimaging, lesion patients, social cognitive tasks, economic tasks, cross-cultural surveys, and computational social science.