Building the Future Together
The work of the faculty, students, and research staff in the Department of Psychology truly makes us stand out worldwide and the legacy from the past 100+ years will propel us into the future to solve the world's most important challenges.
Read more about how our areas of excellence are contributing to build this future:
Psychology at Minnesota is well-known for its rigorous commitment to the study of individual differences. When psychologists speak of 'individual differences' they are referring to a set of variables—e.g., personality traits held by all humans, across many cultures—that vary in expression from one individual to another.
The excellence of Psychology at Minnesota is due in part to our faculty's commitment to interrogating the biological basis of human behavior, perception, and cognition. Fundamentally, humans are biological beings and our faculty have diligently focused on how our behavior, perception, and cognition are rooted in our biology and shaped by our environment, as well as how they evolve over time as we influence each other and our environment.
Faculty in Psychology at Minnesota have a long history of developing of new tools and methods to measure and model psychological phenomena, particularly with regard to individual differences. Many of our faculty were early adopters of “open science” practices, such as preregistration of studies to ensure their results—whatever they may be—are unimpeachable once their measurement and modeling is deployed, thus improving confidence in the science.
In Psychology at Minnesota, our faculty are trailblazers in their multi-pronged approach to exploring determinants and outcomes of health and wellness. Because our faculty uniquely focus on both basic psychological principles and the application of them, health and wellness research is not contained in a single area of health psychology. Rather, it is present across areas within the department.
