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I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory… (Octavio Paz)

The meaning of life and the way we experience our world is a function of objective circumstances, our subjective perception and the interaction between them. In the Person-Situation Lab we are interested in explaining when and why people experience their world differently from each other. We want to explore how our unique personality, our values and dispositions,impact the way we experience the world and react to it, as a function of situational, societal and cultural factors. In essence, we try to understand how the "person" factor blends with the "situation" one.

We draw on theories of personal values and personality traits to capture the "Person" factor in order to explore the motivational and cognitive antecedents of individual differences in behavioral patterns.We ask, for example, how personal values predict our inner conflicts, our reactions to changes in the environment and our prosocial behavior and moral outlooks.

To explore the "Situation" factor -- the role of situations, contexts and environments in affecting human behavior -- we draw on theories from social, organizational and cross-cultural psychology. We are interested for example in the culture of people (e.g., is it more or less conservative), the organizational circumstances (e.g. is an organizational change voluntary or imposed) and the relevance of the situation to the self, here and now (e.g., will the decision take place today or in a year).

We employ a variety of research methods including field longitudinal studies  in organizational and educational contexts and laboratory social-experimental studies. We have also been developing a line of exciting studies using our new Observational-Psychophysiological lab that includes a variety of advanced tools and technologies.

We are always open to hearing from excellent students with a strong psychological and methodological background, at all stages of their academic career including undergraduates,master students, doctoral and postdoctoral students. In particular we are searching for people who have the motivation and ability to learn and use physiological and observational tools to answer our research questions. We also look for people who are interested in the field of organizational studies that have the ability to initiate and develop collaborations with big organizations.