Michele J. Gelfand
American cultural psychologist
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Education and career
Gelfand graduated from Colgate University with a B.A. in psychology in 1989. In 1996 she completed a PhD in social psychology and organizational psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she studied under Harry Triandis. She was on the faculty of New York University from 1995 to 1996, and worked at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1996 to 2021. Thereafter, she began her current position at Stanford University.
She is an editor of Advances in Culture and Psychology, which she co-founded; Psychology of Conflict and Conflict Management in Organizations; and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture. She was the president of the International Association for Conflict Management from 2009 to 2010.
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Research
Gelfand has published work on the influences of culture on conflict and resolution and on revenge and forgiveness. She has worked on theoretical frameworks such as individualism–collectivism and tightness–looseness theory; her book on this topic, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World, was published by Scribner in 2018. A review of the book in the New York Times mentioned that while she is an "engaging writer" and her theory of cultural tightness and looseness is "interesting stuff", Gelfand also "routinely ignores materialist explanations for the various phenomena she considers" In 2026 she had an h-index of 100, according to Google Scholar.