First Impressions, Second Thoughts: How We Make Sense of People and Society
Adil Sarıbay
Kadir Has University, Department of Psychology
Date: 26.10.2026, Monday
Time: 12:30-13:30
Venue: A130 Seminar Room
Abstract:
How do people make sense of others and of society? Much of this happens fast and without intention: we infer traits from a single act, read character from faces, and bring old relationships into new encounters. Reflection can revise these intuitions, but how often, how much, and for whom? This talk traces nearly two decades of research on these questions. The first part covers spontaneous social inference and face perception, including multi-country collaborations and the Boğaziçi Face Database, a set of standardized Turkish face photographs available to researchers upon request. The second part turns to thinking styles: how analytic, intuitive, and holistic thinking relate to sociopolitical beliefs, and where their effects stop. This work was recently synthesized in “Reflection and Intuition in a Crisis-Ridden World” (Routledge). Along the way, I describe the challenges, open-science practices, international partnerships, and graduate training behind the program. The final part closes with where my research program is heading: studying persons as well as averages, asking when reflection helps people resist misinformation, and for whom.
Speaker Biography:
S. Adil Sarıbay received his bachelor’s degree (Psychology) from Middle East Technical University in 2000, his master’s degree (Psychological Sciences) from Boğaziçi University in 2002, and his Ph.D. (Social/Personality Psychology) from New York University in 2008. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Bremen from 2008 to 2010, then served on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Boğaziçi University from 2010 to 2020, advancing from Assistant Professor (2010) to Associate Professor (2013) to Professor (2020), and serving as a visiting researcher at Charles University in Prague (2016–2017). He received the Science Academy’s Young Scientists Award in 2018. In the Fall of 2020, he joined the Department of Psychology at Kadir Has University as Professor, where he currently works. His research focuses particularly on thinking styles, face perception and morphology, and, more recently, idiographic-nomothetic approaches in personality and
social psychology.