Rebecca Koomen is an evolutionary and comparative psychologist researching social dilemmas and delay of gratification, with particular focus on common-pool resource (CPR) dilemmas. She studies CPR and other social dilemmas experimentally from comparative, developmental, and cross-cultural methodological perspectives. Rebecca is also interested in applied methods for redesigning policy and social group characteristics to reduce resource use or increase sustainable behaviours in the real world.
Hailing originally from a small town in upstate New York, Rebecca is a citizen of the US, Canada, and the Netherlands. She completed a BSc in psychology and zoology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She then pursued conservation work with children in Tanzania, working the TZ branch of the Jane Goodall Foundation's Roots & Shoots programme. Following this, she completed a MSc in comparative & evolutionary psychology from the University of St Andrews, UK. Rebecca then earned a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology's comparative & developmental psychology department in Leipzig, Germany, followed by a postdoc in the same lab. Following this postdoc, Rebecca worked as a senior behavioural scientist at The Behaviouralist, a London-based behavioural science firm, where she specialised in testing applied behavioural solutions for reducing impact from resource use behaviours. Rebecca then returned to academic research at the University of Dundee as a Lecturer in the psychology department.
