About

Dov Cohen is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is also affiliated with several other campus units, including the Information Trust Institute, College of Law, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. His research focuses on social-personality psychology, exploring various aspects of human behavior and social cognition. He has contributed to numerous scholarly publications, examining topics such as psychiatric disorders in different cultural contexts, gender and personification in economic settings, value endorsement among religious groups, and satisfaction within intimate relationships. His work emphasizes understanding social and psychological processes across diverse cultural and social environments, contributing to the broader field of social-personality psychology.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Political Science
• Finance
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis
• Biochemistry
• Epistemology
• Business
• Law
• Microeconomics
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Robert S. Wyer, Jr. 1935–2026

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2026-03-16

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Gender, Grammar, and Personification in the Marketplace: Understanding Stock Prices Through the Lens of Gender in a High-Stakes Setting

  Social Cognition · 2025-04-01

  articleSenior author

  We examine the influence of grammatical gender on decision making in an arena where irrational linguistic biases should be ruthlessly rooted out: stock markets. In an archival analysis of 15 years of data from Spanish-speaking countries, stocks of companies with grammatically male names showed greater upward momentum than stocks of companies with grammatically female names. We also “replicated” this effect experimentally, showing that Spanish-speaking respondents predicted that grammatically male (vs. female) stocks that have gone up in the recent past will continue to go up. Experimental manipulations suggested this gendered upward-momentum effect was due to beliefs about men's greater forcefulness and rationality, as stock analysts’ criticisms about timidity and emotional decision-making were more likely to “stick” to grammatically female companies. Some mixed evidence also suggested that stocks of male (vs. female) companies were generally overvalued.

  PublisherDOI

• Value endorsement among Protestants and Catholics within and between countries in Europe: Implications for individualism.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-04-07 · 2 citations

  article

  = 163,586). Results reveal that within a given country, Protestants are more likely to endorse self-transcendence values than Catholics are, and these findings held when controlling for religiosity, differences in socioeconomic status, and differences in religious de-identification. Surprisingly, differences between Protestants and Catholics in value endorsement were sometimes larger among less (vs. more) religious respondents and were detectable even among former Protestants and Catholics, with former Protestants resembling religious respondents more than former Catholics did. Results also reveal that some Protestant-Catholic differences are consistent across cultures, whereas others-principally on the dimension of openness to change versus conservation-are moderated by which group is the majority heritage. We discuss the possible contribution of Protestantism to Western individualism's universalistic orientation, considering the association between Protestantism and self-transcendence values. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Real-time, subjective third-person experiences and psychiatric disorders in dignity, honor, and face cultures

  Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  • Those from face and honor cultures (vs. dignity cultures) were more likely to report real-time, subjective “out of body” experiences. • Such unusual experiences were associated with a variety of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders for those from a dignity culture. • Such experiences had no relation to psychiatric maladies for those from a face culture. • Among those from an honor culture, real-time third-person experiences were especially strongly associated with disorders involving reactive aggression. • Real-time third-person experiencing may be an extension of other ways cultures structure phenomenological experience. Proceeding from the assumption that unusual experiences are sometimes extensions of the normal, we examine a rare phenomenological experience: namely, the real-time, subjective experience of being outside one’s body and looking at oneself as an outsider would. Both face and honor cultures place great emphasis on the self-as-seen-by-others. Thus, past research showed that taking an outsider’s perspective on the self is a more frequent experience in the memory imagery of those from honor cultures and in the memory imagery, mental models, and self-control experiences of those from face cultures, as compared to those from dignity cultures. Here we extrapolate from that past work and show that real-time, subjective out-of-body experiences of taking a third-person perspective on oneself – though unusual – are also found more among those from face and honor, as compared to dignity, cultures. Moreover, whereas such unusual third-person experiences were associated with a variety of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders for those from a dignity culture, they had no such relation to psychiatric maladies for those from a face culture. Among those from an honor culture, real-time third-person experiences were especially strongly associated with disorders involving reactive aggression, consistent with the need to respond forcefully to affronts in order to maintain one’s image in the eyes of others. Real-time third-person experiencing seems an extension of other ways cultures structure phenomenological experience, with implications (or lack thereof) for psychiatric disorders.

  PublisherDOI

• East Asians’ Lower Satisfaction With Homelife Is Plausibly Related to Lower Attitude Similarity Within Couples

  Social Psychology · 2024-07-01

  article

  Abstract: World Values Survey respondents from East Asia (China and Japan) viewed themselves as less similar to their spouses on a variety of attitude domains, compared to respondents from Western and other non-Western cultures. Mediational analyses showed significant indirect effects from the East Asian variable through attitude dissimilarity to lower homelife satisfaction. In all regions, similarity with one’s spouse predicted homelife satisfaction. Unexpectedly, it was a relatively weaker predictor for Western European couples (vs. elsewhere). One puzzle is whether shared attitudes (a) are so important for Westerners that they self-select into relationships where remaining discrepancies are trivial or (b) are so unimportant for Westerners, who needlessly sort themselves on this basis.

  PublisherDOI

• Institutional Inversion and “Demand-Side” Versus “Supply-Side” Views of Culture

  Current Directions in Psychological Science · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Institutional inversion occurs when collective attitudes lead to institutions that in turn lead to behaviors that are the opposite of those attitudes. We illustrate this process with the case of debt, in which antidebtor attitudes in Protestant (vs. Catholic) cultures led to institutions that fostered higher household indebtedness. We describe three factors hypothesized to make institutional inversion more likely: erroneous lay theories (particularly those that take a “demand-side” vs. a “supply-side” view of culture), moralization, and narrow construals (in terms of time, goals, and populations considered).

  PublisherDOI

• The importance of being unearnest: Opportunists and the making of culture.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2022-03-24 · 5 citations

  article

  cooperation in a society. The studies illuminate the role Opportunists play in producing these backfire effects. In addition to highlighting other features shaping culture (e.g., risk and reward in the environment, "founder effects" requiring a critical mass of certain strategies at a culture's initial stage), the studies help illustrate how Opportunists create aspects of culture that otherwise seem paradoxical, are dismissed as "error," or produce unintended consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Laws of Sheḥiṭah (Slaughtering) in Ladino, Constantinople 1510 printing

  Ginzei Qedem · 2022-08-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The article by Dov Cohen and Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald, “Laws of Sheḥiṭah (Slaughtering) in Ladino, Constantinople (Kushta) 1510 printing,” which opens this volume, is dedicated to the remnants of a printed halachic work in Ladino found among the folios of the Genizah. This is most likely the first work in Ladino printed by exiles from Spain who settled in the Ottoman Empire. This composition, entitled Conpendio de las sheḥiṭot (“Compendium on slaughtering”), whose author is unknown, had been considered lost until now. The remnants discovered by the authors of the article were printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century at the Ben-Nahmias brothers’ press in Constantinople. The authors of the article discuss the structure of the essay and its characteristics and present the reader with a facsimile of the original alongside its Hebrew translation.

  PublisherDOI

• Attitudes, behavior, and institutional inversion: The case of debt.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Finance

  Psychologists often posit relatively straightforward attitude-behavior links. They also often study cultural arrangements as manifestations of attitudes and values writ large. However, we illustrate some difficulties with scaling up attitude-behavior principles from the individual-level to the cultural-level: Historical attitudes and values can lead to the creation of intermediating institutions, whose value-expressive functions may be at odds with the behavioral outcomes they produce. Through "institutional inversion," institutions may facilitate rather than inhibit stigmatized behavior. Here we examine attitudes and behavior related to debt, contrast historically Protestant versus Catholic places, and show how cultural attitudes against debt may lead to the creation of institutions that increase-rather than decrease-borrowing. Historical antidebt attitudes in Protestant places have led to contemporary households in Protestant cultures now carrying the highest debt loads. We discuss the importance of supply side factors, attitude → institutions → behavior causal chains, and some blind spots that lead to unintended consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• The Hedonics of Debt

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2020-11-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  their willingness to buy if loans were made longer and more expensive by adding smaller, less "painful" payments to the end.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert M. Lawless

  24 shared

• Joseph A. Vandello

  University of South Florida

  20 shared

• Richard E. Nisbett

  16 shared

• Jean Braucher

  University of Arizona

  11 shared

• Angela K.‐Y. Leung

  Singapore Management University

  11 shared

• Faith Shin

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  9 shared

• Emily Kim

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  8 shared

• Renae Franiuk

  Aurora University

  8 shared