2025 William C. Bier Award
On 9th of August, Professor Joseph Bulbulia, Director of our Centre, was honoured with the APA Division 36 William Bier Interdisciplinary Award at the American Psychological Association conference in Denver, USA.
According to the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, “this award honours an outstanding contribution through publication and professional activity to the dissemination of findings on religious and allied issues or who has made a notable contribution to the integration of these findings with those of other disciplines, notably philosophy, sociology and anthropology.”
As a part of the award ceremony, Professor Bulbulia delivered a lecture, titled “Who Benefits from Religious Attendance? Heterogeneous Causal Effects on Well-being and Cooperation in New Zealand”. His presentation investigated how the causal effects of religious participation on well-being and cooperation vary across different population subgroups.
This work draws on longitudinal data from more than 46,000 New Zealanders in the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, alongside open-source causal inference tools he has been developing in the lab.