Nira Liberman

Nira Liberman is a Professor of Social Psychology at Tel Aviv University, where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She completed all her formal education at Tel Aviv University, earning her Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Comparative Literature, Master's degree in Social Psychology, and PhD in 1997. She also completed postdoctoral work at Columbia University and taught at Indiana University, Bloomington before returning to Tel Aviv University.

Professor Liberman's research focuses on psychological distance and its effects on decision making, evaluation, motivation, and mental representation. She is particularly known for her work on Construal Level Theory (CLT), which examines how psychological distance influences cognitive processing. Her research also extends to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where she developed the Seeking Proxies for Internal States (SPIS) model, as well as to essentialism, disgust, and conservatism.

Her Social Psychology Lab investigates how people mentally traverse beyond the immediate 'here and now' to consider future and past time, distant locations, other people, and hypothetical (counterfactual) events. The lab examines what enables such expansion of mental scope and the consequences of this expansion, including how psychological distancing affects cognitive performance, working memory, and decision making.

Professor Liberman's publication record shows consistent productivity across multiple domains of psychology. Her recent work continues to explore the intersection of Construal Level Theory with OCD mechanisms, moral judgment, and cognitive performance. Her research demonstrates strong theoretical integration across social, cognitive, and clinical psychology domains, with particular attention to the embodied and neural correlates of abstract thinking.

Professor Liberman has established productive collaborations with researchers worldwide, most notably with Yaacov Trope with whom she has co-authored numerous foundational papers on Construal Level Theory. Her work has been published in top-tier psychology journals including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Review, and Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Her lab continues to investigate fundamental questions about how people navigate between proximal and distal concerns, how abstraction enables traversing psychological distance, and how these processes relate to clinical phenomena like OCD. Professor Liberman's research program represents a sophisticated integration of basic cognitive processes with real-world applications in clinical and social domains.