Benjamin Karney M.A. ’92, Ph.D. ’97

Benjamin Karney M.A. ’92, Ph.D. ’97 is a professor of social psychology at UCLA and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. For the past 20 years, he has studied how intimate relationships, and marriages in particular, succeed and fail, publishing over 100 empirical papers and books on this topic.

While on the faculty at University of Florida, Karney was the director and principle investigator of the Florida Project on Newlywed Marriage, a series of longitudinal studies examining the processes through which initially satisfying marriages either remain satisfying or deteriorate over time. In 2003, he conducted the baseline survey of marriage and families for the state of Florida as part of their initiative to support families.

Since joining the faculty at UCLA in 2007, Karney’s ongoing studies have addressed how couples maintain intimacy in stressful environments, including research on military marriages funded by the Department of Defense and research on low-income newlyweds funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.

Karney currently co-directs, with Dr. Thomas Bradbury, the Relationship Institute at UCLA. He has twice been the recipient of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to family science.