P. Lynne Honey

As an undergraduate student, working on my BA in psychology, I fell in love with the study of animal behaviour. This led me to pursue a PhD in experimental psychology, working in an animal lab that studied social learning. Social learning and animal behaviour, combined, really helped me to see how both biology and experience blend to produce behaviours, personalities, preferences, and even disordered behaviour. This interaction of nature and nurture is fundamental to understanding psychology, and thus to understanding human behaviour.

My research and teaching are focused on two main goals. First, I want my students (or my audience, for public talks) to walk away with a better understanding of how our biological predispositions interact with our experiences. Second, I want to be very clear that group differences (like between sexes) are not the same thing as individual differences (between two random people).

Within those two main goals, I conduct research and I lecture on a variety of topics. For example, I have published a number of papers looking at personality traits associated with social dominance, and also how traits of social dominance affect attraction and rivalry. I have also examined other aspects of attraction and mate choice, from both an evolutionary and a learning perspective.

I find that sex and gender, much like evolution and learning, are topics that are really misunderstood. They overlap, but they are not the same thing. If people understood, better, how to understand interactions between biology and experience, how to read graphs, and how to understand what statistics represent, then I think we would have fewer arguments about sex differences and gender identity.