Michele Gelfand Elected as New Member of the Council on Foreign Relations

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that Michele Gelfand, the John H. Scully Professor in Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Professor of Psychology (by courtesy), and affiliated faculty at CDDRL, has been elected a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The CFR is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. Founded in 1921, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy and has no affiliation with the U.S. government. 

Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture — as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 40,000 times and has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, and De Standard. She has also published her work in many scientific outlets, most recently in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Frontiers in Psychology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. She has received over 13 million dollars in research funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the FBI.

Gelfand's election to the CFR is a testament to her expertise in the field of cross-cultural psychology and her commitment to understanding the complexities of international relations. As a member of the CFR, she will have the opportunity to contribute her insights and expertise to discussions on global issues and help shape policies that affect the United States and the world.

Gelfand is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018) and co-editor of the following books: Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Handbook of Conflict and Conflict Management (Taylor & Francis, 2013); and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press). Additionally, she is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology Annual Series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received several awards and honors, such as being elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2016 Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.