Cordelia Fine

Cordelia Fine (born 1975) is a Canadian-born British academic psychologist and writer. She is the author of two books on neuroscience and psychology, several book chapters and numerous academic publications. She wrote the introduction to The Britannica Guide to the Brain, is active as a journalist and wrote the column "Modern Mind" for newspaper The Australian.
Born in Toronto, Fine spent her childhood in the United States and Edinburgh. Fine has a BA with first-class honours in experimental psychology from Oxford University (1995), M.Phil in criminology from Cambridge University (1996), and PhD in psychology from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (2001).

Fine's first book, A Mind of Its Own, synthesizes a large amount of cognitive research to show that the mind often gives a distorted picture of reality. Her second book, Delusions of Gender, argues against the neuropsychological theory that men's and women's brains are intrinsically different by critically analysing hundreds of studies on the subject. "With still such different contexts and circumstances for men and women, it's simply not possible to compare the choices they make and draw confident conclusions about the sexes' different inner natures." Fine's approach to gender has been criticised by those who think it behaviourist, and for not accounting for what psychiatry terms gender identity disorders. However, as Fine pointed out in The Psychologist, the book is concerned with scientific evidence presented as support for the idea that males and females are, on average, 'hardwired' to 'systemise' versus 'empathise', rather than the question of the extent to which core gender identity is 'hardwired'; and that she does not subscribe to a behaviourist or social determinist view of development, but rather "one in which the developmental path is constructed, step by step, out of the continuous and dynamic interaction between brain, genes and environment." Professor Ben Barres, a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University, wrote in a review of the book for PLOS Biology that Fine's "analysis of this data should be required reading for every neurobiology student, if not every human being."

Fine is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Business School, Australia, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Fine lives in Melbourne with her husband and two sons. She is the daughter of noted children's author Anne Fine and New York University Professor Kit Fine. Her sister is University of Washington Professor Ione Fine.

• Fine was named as one of the Top 100 influential people of the year by The Age / Melbourne Magazine, December 2010.
• A Mind of Its Own was one of twelve books long-listed for the prestigious UK Royal Society Science prize 2007.
• Delusions of Gender was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction 2011; the Best Book of Ideas Prize 2011; and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2010. It is a The Guardian and London Evening Standard 2010 Book of the Year, a Washington Post 2010 Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year pick.
• 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing, shortlist, Delusions of Gender

• "Sorry". Royal Society. 30 November 2010. Archived from the original on 19 June 2010. Retrieved 2015-07-15. 
• "Cordelia Fine". Cordelia Fine. Retrieved 2015-10-19. 

Books

• Delusions of Gender. W. W. Norton, 30 August 2010. ISBN 0-393-06838-2
• The Britannica Guide to the Brain: A guided tour of the brain and all its functions. Robinson Publishing, 26 June 2008. ISBN 1-84529-803-9
• A Mind of Its Own. W. W. Norton, 17 July 2006. ISBN 0-393-06213-9.

Journal articles

• Rippon, Gina; Jordan-Young, Rebecca; Kaiser, Anelis; Fine, Cordelia (August 2014). "Recommendations for sex/gender neuroimaging research: key principles and implications for research design, analysis, and interpretation". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00650. ISSN 1662-5161. Retrieved 2016-05-21.