Description du projet
Comprendre l’opinion publique sur des questions sociales essentielles
Découvrir comment les opinions de la société sur les questions sociales importantes évoluent et ce que les citoyens attendent de leurs dirigeants et institutions sociales est essentiel pour les décideurs et les principales parties prenantes s’ils veulent comprendre le lien entre les désirs et les besoins des citoyens d’une part et les structures et institutions sociales qui peuvent faciliter ou empêcher d’assouvir ces besoins d’autre part. Le projet PSYPOL, financé par l’UE, vise à étudier les bases sociales, cognitives et motivationnelles des préférences politiques et leurs conséquences sur le comportement politique des individus et la structure sociale. Le projet examinera les opinions sur des questions sociales clés – inégalités, immigration et relations internationales – et ses travaux permettront d’établir un cadre d’intégration pour étudier les attitudes du public.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
CT2 7NZ Canterbury, Kent
Royaume-Uni