Haleh Yazdi

Haleh Yazdi is a postdoctoral fellow with the Developing Belief Network at UC San Diego. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology in 2022 under the mentorship of Profs. David Barner and Gail Heyman. As an Anthropogeny Specialization student, Haleh was able to merge her interests in human development, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and moral cognition into a cohesive research program.

Haleh’s research aims to understand how children develop group prejudices, notions of fairness and justice, and moral intuitions. She has conducted her studies in Canada, India, Iran, Mexico, and the U.S. to identify how cultural factors, such as extreme class divisions and political instability, affect children’s social and cognitive development. A primary goal of Haleh's work is to identify the role that cultural input plays in shaping cooperative behaviors from childhood to adulthood, with the larger aim to improve group relations globally.