During this project I conducted dozens of psychological studies using employing cutting-edge physiological and social-cognitive measurement tools. These studies examined the factors that shape our political and intergroup attitudes across a wide range of domains and contexts. This research can be divided into three broad areas:
In the first broad area of work, I examined how our political and intergroup attitudes are shaped by physiological sensitivities to different forms of sensory stimuli. For example, in one line of research, I found evidence of an association between interoceptive sensitivity—that is, sensitivity to the internal states and processes of one’s own physical body—and political conservatism. According to our findings so far, the psychological processes that underlie this association are as follows: Individuals who are more interoceptively sensitive appear to place greater trust in intuition and “gut feelings,” as well as to be more sensitive to disgust. In turn, greater disgust sensitivity and faith in intuition appear to predispose people towards adopting a more politically conservative ideology. Based on our preliminary findings, we submitted a Registered Report proposal that will be published in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences.
In the second broad area of work, I used the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand how people form attitudes towards novel political topics, and the degree to which those attitudes are shaped by individual differences in traits such as threat and disgust sensitivity, a tendency to prefer deliberative (versus intuitive) cognitive processing, as well as a range of other factors. For example, in one line of work, which was published in the journal Political Psychology, I found that the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was explained by ideological differences in a large number of social-cognitive traits, including general propensities toward conspiratorial ideation and sensitivity to threat and resource loss.
In the third broad area of work, I have examined the social-cognitive underpinnings of political liberalism and conservatism, in order to better understand the different psychological traits that might predispose an individual towards adopting one political ideology over another. For example, in one line of work, I have found evidence that liberals and conservative may differ in how they conceptualize their social ingroups (i.e. the groups to which they personally belong) and outgroups (i.e. the groups to which they do not belong)—differences that might in turn shape the ideology that a person develops. Based on our preliminary findings, we submitted a Registered Report which will be published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
