Rate My Professor Ilan Dar-Nimrod

Ilan Dar-Nimrod is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, where he serves as Director of the Social Cognition and Individual Differences (SCID) laboratory. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Psychology and an interdisciplinary honors program at the University of Haifa. He then earned a Master of Arts in 2004 and a Doctor of Philosophy in social psychology in 2008 from the University of British Columbia. His research program centers on social cognition, with a primary focus on psychological essentialism, particularly the effects of perceived genetic etiology on affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses. This includes investigations into how beliefs about genetic causes influence attitudes toward obesity, breast cancer, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer’s disease among older adults. Dar-Nimrod explores gene-environment interactions, especially in neuropsychosocial contexts related to health outcomes.

Dar-Nimrod’s scholarship extends to sexuality, examining the origins of sexual orientation, stigma consciousness, internalized homonegativity in lesbian, bisexual, and gay populations, sexual identity labels such as queer and pansexual, and perceptions of consensual non-monogamous relationships. He also studies existential psychology, including death anxiety’s links to worldview defense, aggression, and mental health conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder; gender psychology, covering essentialist views, binary perceptions, and intersectionality; and individual differences such as the personality trait of coolness. His seminal work, including 'Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women’s Math Performance' published in Science (2006) and 'Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA' in Psychological Bulletin (2011, cited over 1,000 times), has garnered more than 6,000 citations. Other key publications appear in Nature Human Behaviour, Genetics in Medicine, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and Journal of Sex Research, addressing topics like death anxiety in mental illnesses (2019), queer identity adoption (2017), and maximization in decision-making (2009). As a recognized expert, his contributions shape understandings of genetic determinism’s societal impacts.