My research begins with a central question: how do landscapes, histories, and institutions become part of us, shaping how we think, feel, and act?
Born in Japan and educated in the United States, I have followed that question from individual experience to the cultural patterns of regions and organizations.
I received my Ph.D. in cognitive, social, and developmental psychology from The New School for Social Research. My dissertation, Homo Loci, introduced placefulness: the degree to which the self is psychologically anchored to particular environments. Through studies with more than 1,400 participants in Japan and the United States, I examined how relocation history shapes identity, memory formation, and prosocial behavior. I received the Irvin Rock Memorial Award, and the dissertation was named a finalist for the Harry C. Triandis Doctoral Thesis Award from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology.
My current work grows through collaborations with Michael Morris and members of his lab at Columbia Business School; Lawrence Hirschfeld at the Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers; Martin Obschonka at the University of Amsterdam; and Masaki Yuki and colleagues at Hokkaido University. These projects examine how place-based social understanding emerges in infancy and how ecological conditions shape the ways communities cooperate, innovate, and organize collective life. This work has taken me from infant studies and cross-cultural surveys to maps, archives, and computational models.
Aiming to bridge research and real-life problems, with collaborators, I founded Stronglight, a research foundry developing cultural models of organizations and regions. Going beyond agent-based modeling, Stronglight seeks to model structures of culture and predict how they’d respond to diverse pressures.
I am happiest among people who take cultural context seriously, cross disciplinary boundaries, and push beyond familiar theories and methods in pursuit of questions without obvious answers.
You can reach me at: tsudaka [at] pm.me