Nicole Hess

Scholarly Professor – Career

Biography

Areas of Focus

Gossip and friendship studies in cross-cultural perspective

Biographical Sketch

Nicole Hess started out as a student at Santa Monica Community College, with broad interests in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and biology. She earned her BA at UCLA in 1997, her MA at UCSB in 1999, and her PhD at UCSB in 2006. She completed predoctoral studies as a member of the first fellowhip cohort of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s LIFE program, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Dr. Hess is currently a Scholarly Associate Professor at WSU Vancouver. Dr. Hess’s research involves using cross-cultural psychological studies to explore aspects of human sociality and cognition. She has also worked as an Academic Advisor in the College of Arts and Sciences at WSU Vancouver for majors in: Neuroscience, Human Biology, Anthropology, Environmental Science, and the General Social Sciences, specializing in helping transfer students make the change to a 4 year university, as well as supporting undergraduate research opportunities.

Research Statement

Hess studies gossip, friendship, cooperation, and coalitional competition. She conducted fieldwork in the Central African Republic and college Greek communities, and has conducted numerous experiments testing hypotheses derived from “Informational Warfare” theory, which proposes that coalitions may be useful in reputational competition (via, e.g., gossip) due to their improved abilities to collect, analyze, and disseminate relevant information. Trained as a multidisciplinary social scientist, Hess uses diverse quantitative and qualitative methods to explore human sociality and cognition, including psychological experiments, surveys, interviews, and ethnographic work.