Postdoctoral Fellowship in Decision-Making, Cultural Narratives, and Cross-Cultural Computational Social Science University of Waterloo in Canada

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Decision-Making, Cultural Narratives, and Cross-Cultural Computational Social Science at the University of Waterloo, in the Wisdom & Culture Lab led by Igor Grossmann.

This postdoc is part of a new SSHRC-funded multi-society project examining how cultural narratives shape behavior in canonical economic and coordination games. The project combines harmonized game protocols, structured narrative probes, multilingual LLM topic modelling, cross-cultural human-in-the-loop validation, and a ManyLabs-style intervention study across a global consortium spanning five continents.

Research areas/keywords: decision-making, social psychology, cognitive/decision sciences, behavioral economics, behavioral game theory, cultural psychology, moral and social judgment, computational social science, and cross-cultural research.

Eligibility highlights: applicants should have a PhD in social psychology, cognitive/decision sciences, behavioral economics, or a related field by the start date; strong quantitative and writing skills; and hands-on experience with computational text analysis (topic modelling, embeddings, LLM fine-tuning, human-in-the-loop validation). Strong R and/or Python skills and reproducible workflows are expected. Experience with multilingual data and large international consortia is an asset.

Funding: 1-year appointment, renewable; salary above SSHRC standard plus benefits. Candidates with their own funding are also welcome. The post also mentions support for competitive candidates through the Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards (CIRTA) nomination process, with a stated award of $70K/year × 2 years for eligible outstanding international candidates.

Application window: apply by 2026-05-31 for a Fall 2026 / Winter 2027 start.

How to apply: email a cover letter, CV, 2–3 page research statement, up to 3 sample publications, and 3 referees to [email protected]. Direct inquiries to [email protected].