Description

Dr. Dorsa Amir is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. She earned a B.S. in Anthropology from UCLA in 2012, a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2018, and completed postdoctoral training in the Boston College and UC Berkeley Departments of Psychology. Dr. Amir's research explores the dynamic relationship between culture and cognition — how cultural environments shape the mind, and how the mind, in turn, shapes culture. The first avenue of her work asks how culture influences cognition. She studies how variation in the socioecological environment shapes decision-making, preferences, and social behavior across development, with a particular interest in identifying which aspects of cognition are universal and which are culturally variable. The second avenue flips the question: she asks how cognition gives rise to culture, focusing especially on children, whose unique cognitive profile makes them underappreciated agents of cultural change. She studies how children's tendencies toward exploration, creativity, and play generate novel cultural information, and how their peer groups transmit and amplify that variation across generations. Recently, she was awarded the 2026 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and she was a finalist in the 2020 AAA Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science.