Susannah B. F. Paletz
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, California 94035
U.S.A.
Phone: (650) 604-2843
Susannah Paletz is a Research Psychologist at NASA Ames Research Center who studies creativity, teamwork, cultural and organizational factors, and the psychology of science. She completed both the Psychology major and the Science in Society program at Wesleyan University (1994, Phi Beta Kappa), receiving High Honors on her thesis examining student attrition from science and mathematics majors. After college, Susannah worked as a research assistant for Dr. William McAuliffe at the National Technical Center for Substance Abuse Needs Assessment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She earned her M.A. (December 1999) and Ph.D. (December 2003) in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborating with Drs. Kaiping Peng, Christina Maslach, and Robert MacCoun. She studied social and personality effects on group creativity with Dr. Maslach and is currently writing a paper with Dr. MacCoun on bias in the interpretation of scientific evidence. With Dr. Peng, Susannah continues to examine the effects of culture on creativity. Susannah's dissertation (which was funded by an NSF East Asia fellowship, a Northern California Phi Beta Kappa scholarship, and a Sigma Xi grant-in-aid) assessed lay theories of creativity using original survey data from Japan, China, and the United States.
Since joining NASA in March of 2004, Susannah has researched team composition and cohesion, organizational risk factors, individual and team selection, and aviation decision-making. She has worked in the Distributed Team Decision Making laboratory and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) laboratory, collaborating with Drs. Judith Orasanu, Christopher Bearman (now at University of South Australia), Alonso Vera, Yuri Tada, and others. Susannah's work in the HCI laboratory recently earned her an Ames Spotlight Award; the HCI lab's work on improving problem reporting software and processes resulted in the whole team receiving a Group Achievement Award from Johnson Space Center.
 Journal Articles:
- Paletz, S. B. F., & Peng, K. (in press). Implicit theories of creativity across cultures: Novelty and appropriateness in two product domains. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
- Paletz, S. B. F., & Peng, K. (in press). Problem finding and contradiction: Examining the relationship between naïve dialectical thinking, ethnicity, and creativity. Creativity Research Journal.
 Paletz, S. B. F., Peng, K., Erez, M., & Maslach, C. (2004). Ethnic composition and its differential impact on group processes in diverse teams. Small Group Research, 35, 128-157.
Other Publications:
- Kraft, N., Orasanu J., Tada, Y., Paletz, S. B. F., Fisher, U., & McDonnell, L. (2006). Enhancing team performance for long-duration space missions. In: Man in extreme conditions: Health, reliability and rehabilitation (pp. 68-70). Moscow: Slovo.
- Paletz, S. B. F. (2007, May 23). Teaching cross-cultural psychology: A textbook in context. Review of Understanding social psychology across cultures: Living and working in a changing world. PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA review of books.
- Paletz, S. B. F., & Schunn, C. (2007). When social and cognitive perspectives blur: The case of developing expertise in science and engineering. In: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Cognitive Science Society and Lawrence Erlbaum.
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