Project description
Elucidating public opinion on key social issues
Uncovering how society’s views on important social issues are changing and what citizens want from their leaders and social institutions is crucial for policymakers and key stakeholders in understanding the connection between what people want and need and social structures and institutions that can facilitate or stand in the way of these needs. The EU-funded PSYPOL project aims to investigate the social, cognitive and motivational bases of policy preferences and their consequences for individuals’ political behaviour and the social structure. The project will examine opinions on key social issues: inequality, immigration and international relations, and its work will lead to an integrative framework for studying public attitudes.
Objective
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.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
CT2 7NZ Canterbury, Kent
United Kingdom