PhD Program in Cognitive, Social & Developmental Psychology

Nature of the Program

The Cognitive, Social & Developmental Psychology Ph.D. provides comprehensive training for students who wish to pursue research in psychology in the interdisciplinary context of the New School for Social Research.  Spanning work in the areas of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology as well as in cognitive neuroscience, the general area includes a special focus on issues of context and culture and on questions of cultural diversity.  General students are free to be supervised by clinical faculty; the program thus represents a rare degree of dialogue and integration between general and clinical psychology.

Research opportunities for students in the Ph.D. program are broad, as the faculty’s own research covers a wide range of topics in psychology.  What is common to the research is the degree to which it continues the New School’s tradition of embodying an openness to multiple perspectives and points of view as well as an interest in both basic theory and issues of application.  Several faculty members explore how cognition is affected by social contexts, for example in studies of group remembering, implicit prejudice in social interaction, social categorization, and perspective-taking in language use.  Other faculty members question the nature of consciousness and awareness, for example in studies of inattentional blindness, the unconscious perception of emotion, or neuropsychological impairment.  Others examine cultural influences on the development of social cognition, motivation, and social relationships as well as issues of inter-group relations and political psychology.

The General Ph.D. program provides training that allows graduates to pursue a variety of kinds of professional work in psychology Graduates go on to professional work in a variety of academic and non academic settings.  They successfully compete for top-rated nationally competitive internships and postdoctoral fellowships, from which some are offered full-time positions.  Some graduates are hired as tenure-track professors at universities and colleges.  Others hold research positions in the computer industry, marketing, or government, or work in hospitals, clinics, research labs, or private practice.  The success of our graduates is a testament to their training in theory, research, and applied areas.  Many of our graduates discover that their New School psychology training provides professional opportunities they hadn’t anticipated, as a recent Ph.D. who is now developing interfaces for speech recognition software would attest.