Naomi de Ruiter receives the Jean Piaget Society Early Career Award

Dr Naomi de Ruiter, Assistant Professor at University College Groningen (University of Groningen), has received a Jean Piaget Society Early Career Award in Developmental Science. She will be accepting the award in person at the 2023 Jean Piaget Conference in Madrid.

Research focus

Naomi de Ruiter is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on the dynamics of identity experiences and identity formation in everyday life. She is interested in how people communicate their identities through their actions and interactions with others, and how these claims to identity are constructed through social interactions. Her work explores how identity can best be studied and analysed in real-life situations, considering it as a dynamic and social process.

Her goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how people's identities form and evolve over time, with the ultimate aim of helping people support each other’s identity development more effectively.

“Toward a Process Approach in Psychology”

Naomi de Ruiter recently co-authored a book called "Toward a Process Approach in Psychology: Stepping into Heraclitus River", published by Cambridge University Press, together with Paul van Geert. The book argues for a shift in the way psychological phenomena and human development are understood, and in the way that psychological research is practiced. Instead of viewing psychological traits and characteristics as unchanging and as isolated ‘variables’, the book argues that they should be seen as ‘processes’ that are constantly in motion and always embedded in other social, contextual, biological, and cultural processes. The book encourages psychologists to adopt a process-oriented approach, which would allow for a better understanding of the complex and ever-changing nature of human experience.

The Jean Piaget Society has described the book as follows:

Van Geert and de Ruiter’s magnificent volume not only advocates for psychological science’s transition to a process ontology but also beautifully elucidates what a process ontology would mean for scientific praxis as a whole—for how we think about and do psychological science

Are you a student or a staff member at the UG? You can find a copy of the book at the University Library.

Alternatively, the book can be purchased through Cambridge University Press.

About the Jean Piaget Society

The Jean Piaget Society, established in 1970, has an international, interdisciplinary membership of scholars, teachers and researchers interested in exploring the nature of the developmental construction of human knowledge. The Society was named in honour of the Swiss developmentalist, Jean Piaget, who made major theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of the origins and evolution of knowledge.