Ziva Kunda

Ziva Kunda was a social psychologist well known for her work in social cognition and motivated reasoning, as well as the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People. She was born in Tel Aviv. Kunda obtained her Ph.D. and MA in Psychology in 1985 at the University of Michigan and her BA in Psychology at the Hebrew University in 1978. Directly after finishing her Ph.D., she became an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Psychology Department. In 1992, she moved to Waterloo, Ontario, where she was an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. 

In 1997, she became a full Professor. Kunda's profile on the Social Psychology Network is actively maintained by social psychologist Scott Plous, in order to provide a resource for those interested in Kunda's work.

In 1999, Kunda authored the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People, one of the books she is well known for. In this book, Kunda begins by painting a picture of the birth of social psychology and cognitive psychology. Before the prominence of these fields, psychology was dominated by behavioral psychology, which focused on studying only observable human behavior; B. F. Skinner's "black box" framed any internal happenings of the human mind as an enigma that should not be explored. 

However, Kunda highlights in the book how, with the rise of the study of cognition in the 1950s and beyond due to the increase of technological research tools (fMRI, EEG, etc.), cognitive scientists began to break down the barriers to understanding human cognition. Kunda covers many topics in the book, from stereotyping and emotional effects on cognition to judgments and behavior. She points out that the topic of social cognition, unique in that most humans have interacted with other humans and therefore have many personal experiences with this research field, collects many presumptions from "lay people" and psychologists alike. Kunda, therefore, emphasizes not only what the theories of social cognition are but also how the theories and empirical findings were developed to highlight efficacy.