Past Member

Diana Orghian

Former Postdoctoral Associate

Diana is a social psychologist interested in how people perceive and extract meaning from the surrounding social world.

She was born in Moldova, but she lived most of her life in Portugal. She attained a Masters Degree in Applied Social Cognition at University of Lisbon and in 2017 she concluded her PhD in Social Cognition at the same university. 

Her research focuses on the mechanisms underlying our social mind and the processes that allow us to simplify the complexity and multidimensionality of the social information. In particular, during her doctoral studies, she researched how people infer personality traits (e.g., friendly or rude) from others' behaviors, how is this phenomenon affected by the social power of the perceived other. More recently, she started to investigate how people judge the attractiveness of others and the biases that contribute to these judgements. 

Last but not least, in her collaboration with Collective Learning, Diana is interested in applying principles and insights from Social Psychology to help create better tools that allow us  to understand in a more comprehensive way the collective organism, how its members interact, how it learns and memorizes, and how it changes over time.