{"id":23,"date":"2026-03-12T17:04:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T17:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/?page_id=23"},"modified":"2026-03-30T10:51:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T16:51:15","slug":"keynote-speaker","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/?page_id=23","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Steven Heine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>
\n

Steven J. Heine is Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. After receiving his BA from the University of Alberta and his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1996, he had visiting positions at Kyoto University and Tokyo University, and was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to British Columbia. He has authored the best-selling textbook in its field, entitled \u201cCultural Psychology<\/em>,\u201d and has written two trade book called \u201cStart Making Sense<\/em>\u201d (2025) and \u201cDNA is not Destiny<\/em>\u201d (2017).\u00a0Heine has received numerous international awards and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.\u00a0 Heine\u2019s research focuses on a few topics that converge on how people come to understand themselves and their worlds. In particular, he is most known for his work in cultural psychology where he has explored the key role that culture plays in shaping people\u2019s psychological worlds. More recently he has explored the concept of cultural fit and how people tend to have greater well-being and health when their behaviors and self-concept are more aligned with the surrounding culture. He has also conducted research exploring how people make meaning in the face of meaninglessness, and how people rely on essentialist biases when they make sense of genetic concepts.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Sleep and Cultural Fit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

People who fit better with their surrounding culture tend to enjoy better well-being in a variety of ways. We explored the role of cultural fit in people\u2019s sleep duration. I\u2019ll discuss the findings from a few studies where we compared sleep durations across several different countries. People in some countries sleep much longer than people in other countries, and these differences are not easily explained. Moreover, despite that sleep duration is strongly linked with health outcomes within cultures we did not find that countries with shorter sleep durations suffer worse health outcomes than those with longer sleep durations. Rather we find that people whose sleep is more similar to their own culture\u2019s norms tend to have better health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven J. Heine is Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. After receiving his BA from the University of Alberta and his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1996, he had visiting positions at Kyoto University and Tokyo University, and was on the faculty … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-23","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156,"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23\/revisions\/156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.psych.ualberta.ca\/ASPS\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}