Biography

David Sherman is professor of social and health psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the president of the International Society for Self and Identity. His research examines how people respond to stress and threatening information, and identifies psychological methods to reduce stress and increase acceptance of potentially threatening information, including health information and information related to the environment.

Research Area

David Sherman and his lab conduct research dedicated to advancing our understanding of how people cope with threatening events and information, and to developing psychologically-grounded interventions for pervasive social issues. Using an interdisciplinary approach fusing lab experiments, field studies, big data sets, and qualitative analysis, our lab investigates the impact of self-affirmation on openness to new information, and performance and stress responses under threatening circumstances. In the health psychology domain, we are interested in developing more effective means of communication to facilitate adaptive health behaviors. A third line of research examines barriers to sustainability and how social and contextual factors predict when people’s beliefs about the environment will lead to environmental action.