Congratulations to Dr. Friedrich Götz who was awarded the 2024 Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) President’s New Researcher Award.
Friedrich Götz, an assistant professor in UBC’s department of psychology, will attend the annual CPA Conference in June 2024 in Ottawa to deliver an award address. The title of his talk will be ‘On the Geography of Psychology’.
The CPA President’s New Researcher Awards recognize the exceptional quality of the contribution of new researchers to psychological knowledge in Canada.
“I am honoured and humbled to receive the 2024 CPA President’s New Researcher Award. This award is special as to me it signifies that three years after I moved halfway around the world to join UBC, I have not only arrived in Vancouver and at my department – where I feel truly at home –but in Canada and Canadian psychology at large. This being said, I very much think of science as a team sport. The research that is being recognised with this award would have been impossible without my many wonderful colleagues, students, and collaborators who make this work not only feasible, but fun. So yes, I will be the one accepting the award in Ottawa (and to be clear: I am beyond thrilled to do that!), but in my mind this award really is a prize for my whole academic family – and I couldn’t be more fortunate.”
We extend our warmest congratulations to Dr. Götz!
“Dr. Götz is an exceptional new researcher. He is a big thinker posing interesting research questions that most scholars would only dream of attempting to tackle. He focuses on intriguing research questions related to personality differences across regions and the non-psychological factors that might shape those differences. At the heart of what impresses me so much about his line of work is the scope in which he poses his questions, namely, across the globe with large and diverse samples. Second, not only is Dr. Götz a big thinker, but he is also a remarkable doer. To tackle the scope of Dr. Götz’s projects requires a remarkable degree of collaboration with others, problem-solving and management, and statistical and data visualization skills. Dr. Götz has demonstrated a high ability to not only complete large-scale projects, but to do them well and with careful consideration.”
Dr Friedrich Götz is a personality researcher and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Originally from Germany, Dr Götz bounced around the globe and obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in England before moving to beautiful British Columbia. In his research, Dr Götz pursues an interdisciplinary Big Data approach to study the causes and consequences of regional personality differences. His work has appeared in top journal such as Nature Human Behaviour, American Psychologist, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and is frequently featured in national and international media outlets such as Scientific American, Forbes, MSNBC, DIE ZEIT, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the BBC.
Title: On the Geography of Psychology
Friedrich M. Götz; Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
Nobody lives in a vacuum. Whoever we are and wherever we go, every second of our existence is spent in a physical and sociocultural environment that we inevitably interact with. Building on this simple fact of life, in the present talk I argue that geography is foundational to psychology and that to understand who we are we need to understand where we are. To support this claim, I present original empirical findings that speak to three broad questions: 1) how do places differ psychologically? 2) why do places differ psychologically? and 3) what do these differences mean for individuals and the places in which they live? To address these questions, in my lab I combine large-scale geo-tagged personality datasets with diverse real-world behavioral outcomes and ecological indicators (e.g., housing prices, personal financial records, patent production rates) across multiple countries (e.g., India, Japan, USA) and spatial levels (e.g., states, cities). Among other results, this work 1) demonstrates systematic regional variation in Big Five personality traits, cultural tightness, courage, and loneliness, 2) identifies various ecological (e.g., mountainousness, walkability, climate), sociocultural (e.g., frontier spirit), and economic factors that may contribute to geographical psychological differences, and 3) shows how regional psychological differences may contribute to outcomes as diverse as suicide rates and individual spending. In the current talk, I will present a whistle-strop tour of this program of research that highlights some of its most compelling and vexing results. I will conclude with personal reflections on doing research at the nexus of psychology and geography, a list of resources for interested researchers and practitioners, and an outlook of how geographical psychological differences could be studied in–and enrich our understanding of–Canada.
