Niobe Way

About

Dr. Niobe Way is an internationally recognized developmental psychologist and a professor at New York University (NYU) with nearly 40 years of empirical research focused on teenagers, particularly boys and young men from diverse ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her work centers on social and emotional development and explores how cultural ideologies shape child development. Dr. Way is a leading expert on topics such as friendships, loneliness, gender stereotypes, masculinity, and the roots of violence. She is the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), co-founder of agapi.teens, and the principal investigator on the Listening with Curiosity Project. She has served as President of the Society for Research on Adolescence and holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, a doctoral degree from Harvard, and completed an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in the psychology department. In her pioneering book, REBELS WITH A CAUSE: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture (Dutton, 2024), Dr. Way draws on her extensive research and the voices of boys and young men to reveal a cultural crisis of connection that underlies rising rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and mass violence among young men. She argues that this crisis stems from a culture that values toughness over vulnerability, logic over feeling, and individualism over community, which she terms "boy" culture—a caricature that harms boys and society alike. Dr. Way…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Gender studies
• Political Science
• Social Science
• History
• Ecology
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Child development in an ideological context: Through the lens of resistance and accommodation

  Child Development Perspectives · 2021 · 69 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Every aspect of child development—from cognition to relationships—is shaped by macrolevel ideologies (e.g., white supremacy, patriarchy) that reflect the social hierarchies and embedded power structures of society. While ecological theories have long underscored the impact of macrosystems and cultures on humans, the field of child development has tended to overemphasize microsystems and often overlooks how ideologies of power shape developmental processes. In this article, we situate ch…

  DOI

• Inter-Relations Between Ethnic-Racial Discrimination and Ethnic-Racial Identity Among Early Adolescents

  Child Development · 2020 · 41 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The authors examined whether the longitudinal inter-relations between ethnic-racial discrimination and ethnic-racial identity vary according to the perpetrator of discrimination. The authors used three waves of data from early adolescents (n = 387; ages 11-12 at Wave 1) to assess the strength and direction of relations between perceived discrimination from non-school adults and peers vis-à-vis ethnic-racial identity exploration, commitment, private regard, and public regard. Cross-lagged autoreg…

  PublisherDOI

• 8. Intimacy, Desire, and Distrust in the Friendships of Adolescent Boys

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 30 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• White Families' Communications About and Around Race: Conversations Between white Adolescents and Their Mothers

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2022-06-16 · 21 citations

  articleSenior author

  Though there is substantial research on racial socialization in families of color, there is less on such socialization in white families. To investigate racial socialization in white families, the current study analyzed mixed-methods data from 46 mother-adolescent dyads. Though white parents and their adolescent children largely claimed to not talk about race, they in fact communicated about and around race through various strategies that in effect, maintained white privilege and failed to chall…

  PublisherDOI

• Lessons of Resistance from Black Mothers to their Black Sons

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2022-03-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In negotiating the anti-Black oppression, Black mothers communicate lessons of resistance in their racial socialization messages to their Black adolescent boys. We investigate whether distinct strategies of resistance for survival, characterized by individual-focused immediate strategies of resistance, and resistance for liberation, strategies of resistance that disrupt systems of anti-Black oppression rooted in furthering collective Black empowerment, are employed in Black mothers' messages to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Diane Hughes

  New York University

  33 shared

• Xinyin Chen

  University of Pennsylvania

  32 shared

• Hirokazu Yoshikawa

  31 shared

• Huihua Deng

  Southeast University

  13 shared

• Leoandra Onnie Rogers

  11 shared

• Zuhong Lu

  Wuxi Fourth People's Hospital

  10 shared

• Vanessa L. Fong

  Amherst College

  9 shared

• Guangzhen Zhang

  Southeast University

  8 shared

Labs

• Science of Human Connection LabPI

Awards & honors

• President of the Society for Research on Adolescence
• The Grand Prix Award at Cannes Film Festival for the movie i…
• Oscar nomination for best foreign film for the movie inspire…

Similar researchers at New York University

• Edward Seidmanh-44
• Joshua Aronsonh-37