Ziva Kunda

Ziva Kunda (1955 to 2004) was an Israeli social psychologist who spent the later part of her career at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. She is best known for her work on social cognition and on motivated reasoning, the way that wanting a particular conclusion shapes how people search memory, weigh evidence and form beliefs. Her 1990 paper "The Case for Motivated Reasoning" in Psychological Bulletin set out an influential framework that separates accuracy goals from directional goals, and it later received the Scientific Impact Award of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She also wrote the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People. Kunda earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1985, taught at Princeton University, and moved to Waterloo in 1992.