| 1 | Name: | Dr. Karen S. Cook | |
| Institution: | Stanford University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2018 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1946 | ||
KAREN S. COOK is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology and Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Stanford University. She is also the founding Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) at Stanford and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Cook has a long-standing interest in social exchange, social networks, social justice and trust in social relations. She has edited a number of books in the Russell Sage Foundation Trust Series including Trust in Society (2001), Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Emerging Perspectives (with R. Kramer, 2004), eTrust: Forming Relations in the Online World (with C. Snijders, V. Buskens, and Coye Cheshire, 2009), and Whom Can Your Trust? (with M. Levi and R. Hardin, 2009). She is co-author of Cooperation without Trust? (with R. Hardin and M. Levi, 2005). She has served on numerous National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committees, including the council, and currently is a member of the DBASSE advisory committee. She also serves as chair of the NSF advisory committee for the social, behavioral and economic sciences (SBE). In 1996, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2004 she received the ASA Social Psychology Section Cooley Mead Award for Career Contributions to Social Psychology. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. Karen Cook conducts research on social interaction, social networks, social exchange, and trust. She is among the foremost scholars who have researched the role of trust dynamics in shaping organizational and institutional outcomes. Her early work focused on how power differentials shaped processes of social exchange within organizations and between individuals within networks, criticizing microeconomic theory for overlooking the social structures within which actors are embedded. Her latest work focuses on the origins and generation of trust in human society and its role in promoting effective use of social capital. In particular, she has done much influential research on the role of interpersonal and social relations in physician-patient relations. She argues that a general trust of others liberates people from safe but closed relationships and facilitates the creation of social capital in a variety of human domains. | |||