SPiEE Lab
Social Psychology in Education & the Environment
We apply principles from social psychology to explore ways to educate the public about the most pressing issue of our time:
the climate crisis.
Welcome to the SPiEE website, home of Dr. Gehlbach & his lab group.
I’m Hunter Gehlbach, Professor & Director of the PhD program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and principal investigator of SPiEE.
An educational psychologist by training and a social psychologist at heart, my interests integrate these main areas:
Social Perspective-Taking
The “social” element of social-emotional learning in middle & high school classrooms
Our lab works to develop interventions to enhance teachers’ and students’ social perspective-taking capacities (or increase their perceptions of what they have in common) as a means to improving teacher-student relationships and sense of belonging.
Environmental Education
By leveraging social psychological theories, we strive to address issues of sustainability, conservation, and climate change—especially for adolescents and their teachers.
Our Approach
We use survey-based interventions for many of our studies and work to identify principles that will help social scientists and educators design better questionnaires.
We strive to implement as many open science practices as we can to make our research process as transparent as possible… on occasion we even write about how to encourage more educational researchers to adopt more open science norms and practices.
Check out our latest work
Stories promote sophisticated learning. So why are they disappearing?