Shelley Elizabeth Taylor (born 1946) is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include "The Tending Instinct" and "Social Cognition", the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.