Ziva Kunda (June 13, 1955 - February 24, 2004) was a social psychologist well known for her work in social cognition and motivated reasoning.
Kunda obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and was the author of the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People. Later, she was a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She was married to Paul Thagard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. In year 2004 succumbed to cancer. Her paper "The Case for Motivated Reasoning," published in Psychological Bulletin in 1990, posthumously received the Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.