Expert Profile

Susan Birch, PhD Yale

Associate Professor

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.)
  • English

Susan Birch

Email: sbirch@psych.ubc.ca

Phone: 604-822-3994

Website: http://kidstudiescentre.com/

Alternate Contact

Erik Rolfsen
UBC Media Relations

Tel: 604-822-2644
Cell: 604-209-3048
Email: erik.rolfsen@ubc.ca