The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

What makes us who we are? My goal is to investigate the origins of human behavior, and especially interpersonal differences, while understanding that humans are both biological beings and social actors. For this purpose, I founded the Longitudinal Israeli Study of Twins, in which we follow the development of hundreds of children to get a comprehensive picture of all the complexity of genetic and societal influence on social and emotional development processes in childhood and adolescence. My students and I approach these questions with the help of twin studies, family studies and other longitudinal studies, some of which are cross-cultural, using approaches from behavioral genetics, social and developmental psychology. I have no doubt that adding elements from the fields of biology, artificial intelligence, sociology and machine learning is required to get an even more comprehensive picture of how interpersonal differences in personality, empathy, pro-social behavior and values develop.