Rita Anne McNamara

Hello/ Kia ora/ Ni sa bula, and welcome/ haere mai/ bula vinaka to my website!

I work as a Senior Lecturer in Cross-cultural Psychology in the Victoria University of Wellington School of Psychology, where I am director of the Mind in Context Lab. I am also a Fellow of the Victoria University of Wellington Centre for Cross-Cultural Research.

Before moving to New Zealand, I earned my Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, BC. I worked in the Culture and Cognition Lab with Ara Norenzayan and in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab with Joe Henrich.

I am a member of the Center for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture (HECC). I also worked with the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) Evolution of Religion and Morality Project as a member of the Ethnographic and Experimental research group.

I earned my M.A. from UBC in 2012. Before that, I earned my B.A. with a double major in Anthropology and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009.