Alexander Haslam
Program
Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being
Appointment
Senior Fellow
Institution
University of Queensland
Country
Australia 
Dr. Alexander Haslam is a social psychologist and Senior Fellow of CIFAR’s Social Interactions, Identity & Well-Being program. His work examines how social identities and group memberships influence our interactions with others. He researches such questions as: How does belonging to groups and organizations shape the way we think, feel and behave? And how do individuals and groups in turn shape the nature of organizations and society?
Dr. Haslam approaches these questions by identifying and explaining how people’s membership in groups and teams affects a range of social and organizational processes including stereotyping and prejudice, leadership and motivation, communication and decision-making, and stress and mental health. This research often generates results that challenge the conventional wisdom of both theory and practice. For example, work by Dr. Haslam and his colleagues has demonstrated that the ability to maintain valued group memberships plays a key role in outcomes as varied as stroke recovery and adjustment to organizational change.
Dr. Haslam began his investigations at Macquarie University in Australia, where he earned his PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar. He is now a Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Exeter in England and has published several books on social and organizational psychology. Dr. Haslam is the former Associate Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and was the Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology. Currently, he is on the editorial board of seven international journals, including Scientific American Mind.
He is the author of Psychology in Organizations: The Social Identity Approach (2001) (2nd ed., 2004), which was short-listed for the British Psychological Society (BPS) Book Award in 2003. Dr. Haslam is also the co-author of The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (2010). In 2005, he was awarded the Kurt Lewin Award for outstanding contribution to research in social psychology from the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology and was short-listed for the Times Higher Education (THE) Research Project of the Year for his work on ‘The Glass Cliff’ with Michelle Ryan.
In 2010 Dr Haslam received the British Psychology Society's Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Psychology, and a National Teaching Fellowship from the Higher Education Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Macquarie University in Australia.
