Bahar Köymen

Bahar Köymen is a Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology at the University of Manchester, UK. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her research focuses on children’s socio-cognitive development, particularly peer interactions, moral reasoning, and collaborative reasoning. She leads courses on developmental psychology and language in educational settings. Her work has been funded by major grants from Templeton World Charity Foundation, European Research Council, and British Academy.

Education: B.A. (Psychology, Middle East Technical University), M.A. (Psychology, Koç University), M.A./Ph.D. (Education, UC Santa Barbara).

Research interests include children’s reasoning in collaborative contexts, moral judgments, social norms, and common ground. She currently supervises multiple PhD students and collaborates internationally on projects involving cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analyses of child development.

Key grants include investigations into collective reasoning in early childhood and the social epistemology of argumentation. Her lab includes postdoctoral researchers and PhD students working on topics like gaze behavior, promise-making, and evidential strength processing in preschoolers.