Niobe Way

Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, co-founder of agapi and the Center for Youth and Connection-by-Design Technology, the PI on the Listening with Curiosity Project and the Science of Human Connection Lab, and the PI on a 20-year longitudinal study of 1,200 Chinese families. She was President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctoral degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard, and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the psychology department. She served on the Aspen Digital group on humanizing AI, was a consultant for TikTok, and currently serves as a senior fellow for the Carnegie Foundation.

‍

Her mixed-method and longitudinal research examines the social and emotional development of children and adolescents and how macro ideologies shape families and child development in the U.S. and China. Way and her team created the Listening with Curiosity Project (LCP) to address the crisis of connection in schools by teaching the skills of relational intelligence necessary for human connection. The LCP has been integrated into classrooms across NYC and has been empirically proven to foster social and emotional skills and wellbeing, as well as a sense of common humanity. She also developed a core NYU course, “The Science of Human Connection.”

‍

Her latest sole-authored book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture. Her latest co-edited book is The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution. She has authored or co-authored over one hundred journal articles and seven books, including Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which was the inspiration for Close, a movie that was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film and won the Grand Prix Award. Her research with boys and young men has helped change the guidelines for Division 51 of the American Psychological Association. Her book in progress is Our Social Nature in an Anti-Social Culture: A Five-Part Story.