Meet Darcia Narvaez, PhD

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Darcia Narvaez is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She is the co-founder of the public and professional educational outreach project the Evolved Nest Initiative whose nonprofit mission is to share her science research into developing appropriate, species-normal baselines for lifelong human and planetary wellbeing along with providing concrete guidelines for fostering full human potential.

Note: A wellbeing baseline is imperative at this time as, for example, the monetarily wealthiest nation whose culture affects the world, the United States, ranks 40th out of 40 developed countries in public policies that support families (see the UNICEF Report). 

In 2024, Dr. Darcia received the Presidential Citation Award from Division 24, the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, of the American Psychological Association (APA). Established in 2019, the Presidential Citation Award honors a nationally or internationally recognized scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of psychology or to a body of interdisciplinary scholarship. Narvaez was nominated for the Presidential Citation Award based because of her work that supports the flourishing of theoretical psychology in both publications and the educational outreach programs, material, and events offered to the general public through the Evolved Nest Initiative.

The 2024 award is the second time the APA has recognized Narvaez’s work. Her book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, won the APA’s 2015 William James Book Award. The Evolved Nest Initiative, ENI, is a transdisciplinary insight based on the research and findings described in this book. 

A trilogy of films featuring the science of the evolved nest, narrated by Dr. Darcia, are: Breaking the Cycle, The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children; and Reimagining Humanity. All films are subtitled in 15 languages. The films have been translated into German, Spanish, and Turkish. 

In 2022, Narvaez was elected a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest international body of professional scientists in the world and publisher of the prestigious journal Science. Narvaez was honored for her distinguished contributions illuminating typical and atypical human development in terms of well-being, morality and sustainable wisdom. She was already a fellow of the APA, the American Psychological Association (APS), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

In a 2020 analysis of top scientists, Narvaez emerged in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. Of the approximately eight million scientists in the world, the analysis concerned those who had at least five articles published in scientific journals between 1996 and 2017 – over six million scientists. Individuals were ranked according to various criteria, including number of citations of their work.

In 2017, Narvaez won the inaugural Expanded Reason Award for research, beating out more than 360 total entries from 170 universities and 30 countries. She won primarily for the scholarship in her book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. She received the prize, including a substantial monetary award, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City.

Narvaez had several careers before entering academia, including church organist and musician, classroom music and Spanish teacher, seminarian, business owner, and Hispanic community human resource developer. For the first portion of her academic career, Narvaez investigated moral psychology and moral development in typical ways — through studying reason, cognition, and education. But with growing evidence of human disorder in the personal and the sociopolitical realm (e.g., Iraq war instigation), she read widely across disciplines in an effort to solve what had gone wrong with humanity. 

She says: “I realized that all these fields bore on moral development. I was awakened to the fact that human beings are a particular species with particular needs that, especially in early life, need to be fulfilled in order to construct an individual’s sociality and compassionate morality,” she said. “The key insight was realizing that our species’ evolved nest is vital for fostering our cooperative human nature. When the evolved nest is degraded, as it is in industrialized countries, it can impair capacities for cooperation and compassion because early stress is toxic to species-typical neurobiological function.”

With a wider lens on the sciences, Narvaez hosted interdisciplinary conferences at the University of Notre Dame regarding evolution, early experience, and human development in 2010, 2012, and 2014. In 2016 she organized a conference on Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous KnowHow for Global Flourishing. (Click on the links to see the full conferences in video on the Evolved Nest's YouTube Channel.)

Her empirical, theoretical, and applied scholarship today focuses on the kinds of practices and outcomes notable in deeply nested communities that provide the evolved nest to babies and to everyone throughout life, societies that demonstrate wellbeing, heart-minded morality, and communal imagination.

Narvaez is the author or editor of dozens of books, chapters, and articles: see The Science page for listings.  She has written hundreds of blog essays that focus primarily on species-normal baby child raising, human flourishing and morality, and returning to indigeneity. For all these materials, visit her University of Notre Dame page here. 

Dr. Darcia is the current president of the award-winning nonprofit Kindred World. See all of Kindred World's strategies and initiatives for advancing a Wisdom-based, Wellness-Informed Society here. She is a contributing editor and author to Kindred, the first global, eco-parenting magazine and a member of the board of directors of Attachment Parenting International.

The Evolved Nest is an initiative of Kindred World. Dr. Darcia’s leadership at Kindred World, as its president, is forging a praxis, a practical application of the Evolved Nest principles, through the Nested World Initiative and the Nesting Ambassador program. The program launches in fall 2025.