Hazel Rose Markus Wins 2026 Sage-CASBS Award

Sage and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University are pleased to announce Hazel Rose Markus as winner of the 2026 Sage-CASBS Award.

Established in 2013, the Sage-CASBS Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advance our understanding of pressing social issues. It underscores the role of the social and behavioral sciences in enriching and enhancing public discourse and good governance. Past winners of the award include Daniel Kahneman, Pedro Noguera, Kenneth Prewitt, William Julius Wilson, Carol Dweck, Jennifer Richeson, Elizabeth Anderson, Alondra Nelson, and Daron Acemoglu.

Hazel Markus is the tenth recipient of the Sage-CASBS Award. A world-renowned social psychologist, Markus has pioneered theory and research on self, identity, and agency, and how they provide meaning and structure to people’s daily lives. She has illuminated ways in which cultural contexts and psychological processes constitute each other. Her basic and applied work cut across different problem areas related to education, health, climate, and policing, and have significantly broadened our understanding of human behavior beyond Western, affluent, industrialized contexts.

“In her pathbreaking explorations of how people are shaped by, and in turn can shape, their various cultures, Hazel Markus gets to the heart of things that can both unite and divide us – religion, ethnicity, gender, class, race, nation of origin, and other demographic characteristics,” said Blaise Simqu, CEO of Sage. “In so doing, she has expanded our knowledge about the feelings, behaviors, and interactions that constitute our social world and deploys that knowledge in real-world settings. I’m proud that Sage and CASBS are honoring Professor Markus for her critical, impactful contributions.”

Markus has served on the faculty of Stanford University since 1994 and since 1996 as the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Psychology. She is a co-founder and current faculty co-director of Stanford SPARQ, which builds research-driven partnerships with industry leaders and change makers to address society challenges in education, health, criminal justice, and economic development. She previously served as director of Stanford’s  Research Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Externally, she is a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and an advisor to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging Program. Before joining Stanford, Markus held faculty appointments in psychology at the University of Michigan as well as research scientist appointments at the Research Center for Group Dynamics within that university’s Institute for Social Research (1975-94). She also served as president of the Personality and Social Psychology Society (2003-04).

Notably, Hazel Markus has enjoyed three CASBS fellowships throughout her career. In addition to undertaking individual research, during each fellowship she was a member of special group projects approved by the Center: The Social Psychology of Stigma (1980-81), which resulted in the book Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships (1984); Culture, Mind, and Biology (1995-96); and, as project leader, of How Race and Culture Constitute Psychological Experience (2008-09), which resulted in the book Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. The latter two projects played important roles in advancing the interdisciplinary field of cultural psychology, with Markus a key figure at its nucleus.

“Hazel Markus has fundamentally changed how we understand the relationship between people and their social worlds,” said Lara Tiedens, CASBS’s Sara Miller McCune Interim Director. “Through her groundbreaking research on possible selves and cultural models of selfhood, she has demonstrated how deeply culture shapes psychological experience – and shown that much of what the field assumed was universal is in fact culturally particular. In doing so, she gave psychology a rigorous, structured framework for studying what the field had long acknowledged but struggled to examine systematically. Few scholars have reshaped a field from the inside out the way Hazel Markus has. I’m thrilled that Sage and CASBS are recognizing her contributions with this award.”

Markus is the author or coauthor of more than 250 peer reviewed articles appearing in leading publications such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Psychological Review, Journal of Social Issues, Science, American Psychologist, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to Google Scholar, her work has been cited by others nearly 150,000 times. She is coauthor of the books Social Stigma (1984) with Edward E. Jones, Amerigo Farina, Albert H. Hastorf, Dale Miller, and Robert A. Scott; Social Psychology (1989 [2024]), with Steve Fein and Saul Kassin, now in its 12th edition; Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence (1994) with Shinobu Kitayama; and Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World (2014) with Alana Conner.  She is co-editor of four cross-disciplinary books – Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (2002, with Richard Shweder and Martha Minow), Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (2008, with Richard Shweder and Martha Minow), Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction (2012, with Susan Fiske), and Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (2022, with co-author and co-editor Paula Moya).

Markus’s innovative research and intellectual breadth have pushed the frontiers of knowledge within and outside of psychology. Her work, moreover, embodies a spirit of collaboration that aligns with CASBS’s seven-decade ethos and vision for the social and behavioral sciences. Her early-career research and theorizing demonstrated the importance of self-schemas – cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experiences – in organizing knowledge about the self and in guiding processing of self-relevant information. Based on that work, Markus later demonstrated in coauthored works on “possible selves” – people’s ideas of what they might become or would like to become – that people’s concepts of self have interpretive force, providing meaning to past, current and future experiences, as well as motivational force, guiding them to approach some people and environments and avoid others.

In perhaps her most celebrated set of contributions, initially with collaborator Shinobu Kitayama (a CASBS fellow with Markus in 1995-96 and 2008-09), she showed how self-concepts vary across cultures, defined as the ideas, institutions, and interactions that guide individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. They distinguished two ways of conceptualizing the relationship between self and the social world: an “independent” way of being (where agency is organized and made meaningful by a person’s internal feelings, thoughts, and actions) and an “interdependent” way of being (where agency is more relational or conjoint and is contingent on and organized by the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others in relationships). In a classic article (cited more than 37,000 times), Markus and Kitayama demonstrated theoretically and empirically how these models of self change the role of people’s relationships with others in U.S. and Japanese contexts. Moreover, these differences are reflected in affective, cognitive, and motivational processes previously assumed to be universal. Their paper provided a needed framework for translating differences at the national level into differences at the psychological level. As a result, the paper (and many that followed) provided testable hypotheses that inspired three decades of research in cultural psychology, which effectively compelled psychology to broaden its focus beyond Western contexts. 

Markus continued with groundbreaking work showing how other sociocultural contexts – e.g., socioeconomic status, gender, age – also give rise to different models of the self, with consequences for relationships, education, health, economic development, and health. Markus framed decades of cultural psychology’s principal insights for a public audience in the book Clash! with coauthor Alana Conner. The book describes how frictions between mostly independent cultures and mostly interdependent cultures can ignite or lead to intergroup tensions among regions, races, genders, classes, religions, and organizations; how cultures may be conceptualized as multi-layered cycles of individuals, interactions, ideas, and institutions; how people are “culturally-shaped shapers;” and how to foster intentional culture change.

In addition, with her colleagues and students, Markus has published a series of papers aimed at applying findings in cultural and social psychology to public health, economic development, sustainability, inequality and social class, and education. Examples include work showing how expanding universities’ ideas and practices to include more interdependent ideas and values can increase working-class students’ access to and performance in higher education; how training school teachers (who are predominantly White) to create culturally inclusive and interdependent spaces improves their students’ (who are predominantly Latinx) psychological and academic outcomes; and how framing cash transfers with interdependent-, community-, and family-oriented narratives increases low-income Kenyan recipients’ motivation to learn new skills and reduces stigma compared to existing narratives. In 2024, Markus and collaborators demonstrated how different national responses to the COVID pandemic reflected cultural differences in default ways of thinking, feeling, and acting – and, importantly, how these different defaults can be taken into consideration when preparing for the next pandemic.

Further illustration of Markus’s focus on applied social impact is through Stanford SPARQ. As one example, she worked with co-director Jennifer Eberhardt, Benoit Monin, and members of the Oakland Police Department, through questionnaire design interventions, to reduce common triggers of bias and the number of stops Oakland police officers made of people who were not committing any serious crimes. Markus and Stanford SPARQ also work with community partners to develop toolkits and “solutions catalogs” that translate research into user-friendly formats that practitioners and educators can use to catalyze psychological, behavioral, and societal change. The toolkits help students and co-workers talk about race, help development practitioners decide what psychological and economic measures to use in their projects, and help police officers improve police community relations.

As acknowledgments of her career achievements, Hazel Markus is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), the National Academy of Sciences (2017), and the American Philosophical Society (2025), as well as an elected corresponding fellow of the British Academy (2019). She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2006.

Markus has been recognized by numerous honors and awards. A sampling includes the Donald Campbell Award (2003), the Outstanding Contribution Award to Cultural Psychology (2017), and the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize (2021) from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology; the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (2008); and the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (2017).

CASBS and Sage disseminated a public call for award nominations in October 2025. Hazel Markus was selected as the winner among the nominees after a rigorous selection process. The Sage-CASBS Award selection committee consisted of Blaise Simqu, CEO of Sage; Lara Tiedens, Sara Miller McCune Interim Director of CASBS, Stanford University; Corey Fields, Associate Professor of Sociology and Idol Family Term Chair, Georgetown University, and 2025-26 CASBS fellow; Richard Saller, Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies, former dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and former president, Stanford University, and 1986-87 CASBS fellow; and Allison Stanger, Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor, Middlebury College, and 2020-21 CASBS fellow.

Sage is the proud funder of the award. In addition to receiving a cash prize, Hazel Rose Markus will deliver a public award lecture at CASBS on Thursday, May 7, 2026. The event will be free and open to the public. CASBS will release event details in April.