Descripción del proyecto
Dilucidar la opinión pública sobre cuestiones sociales clave
Descubrir cómo están cambiando las perspectivas de la sociedad sobre cuestiones sociales importantes y lo que quieren los ciudadanos de sus líderes e instituciones sociales resulta fundamental para que los responsables políticos y las principales partes interesadas comprendan la conexión entre lo que la gente quiere y necesita y las estructuras sociales que pueden facilitar o bien dificultar la satisfacción de estas necesidades. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos PSYPOL busca investigar las bases cognitivas y motivacionales de las preferencias políticas y sus consecuencias para la estructura social y la actitud política de las personas. El proyecto examinará opiniones sobre cuestiones sociales clave: desigualdad, inmigración y relaciones internacionales, y su trabajo conducirá a un marco integrador para el estudio de las actitudes públicas.
Objetivo
To understand how modern democracies function, we must understand how mass opinion on public policy is formed, develops, and changes over time (i.e. its causes), and how it affects the social structure (i.e. its consequences). Research on public policy in economics, political science and sociology has revealed a puzzling pattern– people’s political attitudes often do not reflect objective reality or rational self-interest. Psychology has a long tradition of examining the social pressures, cognitive biases, and competing motivations that prevent people’s attitudes from aligning with objectivity and rationality. PSYPOL will extend these insights to the political domain, by examining the social, cognitive, and motivational bases of policy preferences (Objectives 1, 2 & 3). It will also examine the consequences of these preferences for individuals’ political behavior (Objective 4) and for the social structure (Objective 5). The project will focus on three areas of public policy that share common conceptual roots and empirical gaps, as well as being highly salient in contemporary politics: inequality, immigration and international relations. PSYPOL will take a novel causal-developmental approach by testing processes of psychological change in massive samples of adolescents and adults, concurrently. Two largescale data collection initiatives– VOICE (adults) and SNAP (adolescents) –will enable five state-of-the art methods, each offering unique and complementary insights. These are: (1) longitudinal and (2) multilevel modeling of panel data (3) social-cognitive experiments (4) experience sampling and (5) network analysis. Thus, PSYPOL will apply theory and methods from social, developmental, cognitive and political psychology to answer empirical questions arising across the social sciences. This will generate an integrative framework for studying public attitudes towards policies that determine how symbolic and material resources are distributed in democratic societies.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
CT2 7NZ Canterbury, Kent
Reino Unido