Dr Daniel Skorich

Daniel Skorich is a Lecturer in the School of Medicine and Psychology at the Australian National University, and a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Daniel’s research interests are broadly in the domain of social cognition and social psychology, with offshoots in clinical psychology, health psychology, and computational theories of mind. His PhD research challenged existing cognitive resource-focused accounts of stereotyping and impression formation. Since completing his PhD, Daniel has developed a new model of autism – the Integrated Self-Categorization model of Autism (Skorich & Haslam, 2022) – which brings together the disparate cognitive-perceptual and social-communicative aspects of the condition under a single explanatory framework. His current research includes a critique and re-imagining of self-categorization theory, including the formulation of a multinomial processing tree model of self-categorization salience; the development of a dynamic model of person and group-level face perception; and an attempt at answering the “why” and “how” questions of consciousness. Daniel is currently writing a book with Dr Ken Mavor – Person as Category Theory: Rethinking the Nature of the Personal Self (Routledge, forthcoming) – which provides an integrated account of person and group processing across a wide variety of domains and, among other things, introduces a new model of impression formation and stereotype formation. Daniel has also written a (still unpublished) book The Goat Track to Freedom: Essays on Anarchism and Human Nature  for an activist audience, which touches on themes of political and social change.