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 an International Fellow of the British Academy.

The British Academy is the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. This year, 92 scholars were elected to its Fellowship, coming from 28 universities across the UK along with 32 International Fellows and two Honorary Fellows. Gelfand was elected within the Academy's Psychology section. She joins a broader fellowship community of more than 1,800 scholars, whose expertise spans disciplines from economics to philosophy and archaeology.

Gelfand is one of three scholars with Stanford ties elected this year, alongside Professor Alfredo J. Artiles, Lee L. Jack Professor of Education at Stanford University, and Dr. Mary Louise Pratt, Silver Professor Emerita at New York University and Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford.

Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to study the evolution of culture and its consequences for human groups, examining how negotiation, conflict, trust, revenge, and forgiveness play out differently across societies. She has published over 200 scientific articles and chapters, including in Science, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and her work has been featured in The Guardian, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Economist, NBC News, and NPR, among other outlets.

Gelfand's election to the British Academy adds to a growing list of honors recognizing her contributions to cross-cultural psychology. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2023) and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2021), as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019). She is also past president of the International Association for Conflict Management, past division chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management, and past treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology.

She 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).

Gelfand's election as a Fellow reflects the international reach of her scholarship and underscores the role her work plays in advancing cross-cultural understanding on a global stage. British Academy President Susan J. Smith said that amid technological, economic, and environmental upheaval, "the humanities and social sciences have never been more important" — a claim Gelfand's own research helps bear out.