Descrizione del progetto
Fare chiarezza nell’opinione pubblica su aspetti sociali di rilievo
È fondamentale per i responsabili delle politiche e per i principali interlocutori scoprire il modo in cui sta cambiando il punto di vista della società su importanti aspetti sociali e su cosa vogliono i cittadini dai loro leader e dalle istituzioni sociali, ai fini della comprensione del collegamento tra ciò che le persone vogliono e di cui hanno bisogno e le strutture e le istituzioni sociali in grado di agevolare oppure di ostacolare tali bisogni. Il progetto PSYPOL, finanziato dall’UE, intende studiare le basi sociali, cognitive e motivazionali delle preferenze politiche e delle loro conseguenze sul comportamento politico degli individui e sulla struttura sociale. Il progetto esaminerà le opinioni sui principali aspetti sociali: disuguaglianza, immigrazione e relazioni internazionali e il suo lavoro produrrà un quadro integrativo per lo studio degli atteggiamenti pubblici.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
CT2 7NZ Canterbury, Kent
Regno Unito