Ziva Kunda

Ziva Kunda (; June 13, 1955 – February 24, 2004) was an Israeli social psychologist and professor at the University of Waterloo published in Psychological Bulletin in 1990, posthumously received the Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Kunda authored the book Social Cognition: Making Sense of People.

Biography Ziva Kunda was born in Tel Aviv. Her parents were from Oudtshoorn, a small South African town. They immigrated from different parts of Europe to Oudtshoorn to find safety from the persecutions of Jews before and during World War II.

Academic career Kunda obtained her PhD and MA in psychology in 1985 at the University of Michigan, and her BA in Psychology at the Hebrew University in 1978. Directly after finishing her PhD, she became an assistant professor at Princeton University in the Psychology Department. In 1992, she moved to Waterloo, Ontario, where she was associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo.

Research and publications

Motivated reasoning Kunda's 1990 article, "The Case for Motivated Reasoning, They found that when someone is engaging with another individual in a stereotyped group, that person is not always thinking about the group's stereotype. When they do think about the stereotype, the stereotype does not always play a role in their judgements. Kunda also found that when stereotypes change, they usually do so incrementally or through causal reasoning.

Legacy Kunda's seminal work on motivated reasoning has influenced several fields of communication research including: media framing, risk communication, public opinion, misinformation,