Seminars 2024/2025

Dominik Stecula, Ohio State University

We Need To Talk: How Cross-Party Dialogue Reduces Affective Polarization

Americans today are affectively polarized: they dislike and distrust those from the opposing political party more than they did in the past, with damaging consequences for their democracy. This talk focuses on one strategy for ameliorating such animus: having ordinary Democrats and Republicans come together for cross-party political discussions based on a short Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Dr. Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania. Building on intergroup contact theory, we argue that such discussions mitigate partisan animosity. Using an original experiment, we find strong support for this hypothesis – affective polarization falls substantially among subjects who participate in heterogeneous discussion (relative to those who participate in either homogeneous political discussion or an apolitical control). We also provide evidence for several of the mechanisms underlying these effects, and show that they persist for at least one week after the initial experiment. These findings have considerable importance for efforts to ameliorate animus in the mass public, and for understanding American politics more broadly.

BIO: Dominik Stecuła is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, and before that a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia. His research agenda is situated primarily in the fields of political and science communication. In his research, Stecuła analyzes both the supply and the demand side of the information environment, how it impacts public opinion formation on important societal issues, like climate change and vaccinations, and how misinformation can influence these processes. His peer reviewed articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and many others. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, PBS, NBC, and many other outlets in the US, Canada, and Poland.

Jacob Groshek, Kansas State University

Rural and Radical, Terror on X, and Social Science in the Paid-API Era

In order to better understand cleavages in public opinion, this talk reports briefly on three interrelated media research endeavors.

First, Rural and Radical is a book project where we argue that the 2024 U.S. election is a battleground of not just facts versus misinformation but also a contest of censorship versus transparency.  This book highlights the contemporary hybrid media system and the role it plays in bringing constituents together as well as the mechanisms by which democracy can be fractured and polarized with a specific focus on the rural Midwest.  Using several years of data, we examine the mythology of filter bubbles and the impact of misinformation in the heartland with qualitative interviews that explore attitudes and beliefs prevalent in red-state America, and couple those findings with AI and algorithmically filtered social media data analyses. Through research on a large geographical space that is routinely ignored but crucial to political outcomes in the US, it becomes clear that partisan hybrid media outlets fuel a growing distrust of media systems and political actors that may well contribute to a second Trump presidency.

Next, Terror on X is a working conference paper from the Midwest Political Science Association that examines a year’s worth of international news coverage of terrorist attacks on X (formerly Twitter). In this comparative approach, we use computational modeling to track the volume and sentiment filtered through millions of posts on X from three elite newspapers in the US and the UK in 2023. Here, we build on prior research using World Systems Theory to identify how the location of a terrorist attack and the identity of the perpetrator committing the attack affect media coverage of terrorism. In doing so, we update a wide swath of literature to incorporate not only extensive changes to the platform formerly known as Twitter (now X) but also media coverage of the ongoing conflicts in the Ukraine and Israel as well as which perpetrators are more often labeled as terrorists in domestic and international incidents.

Finally, Social Science in the Paid-API Era references an open special issue call for the journal Media and Communication where we address how social media data now is increasingly hard to source.  Once-free APIs and academic research platforms are mostly decommissioned or locked down by exorbitant paywalls and may also require technological expertise to access and analyze data. This situation has become more dire in recent months and has further bifurcated social media researchers into data “haves” and data “have nots”—and our field is currently adrift as to what the most viable portals and best practices for acquiring social media data are, which has resulted in isolated data vaults and fragmented efforts. Through this special issue and our own efforts at the Institute for Representation in Society and Media, we attempt to move at the pace of data to help manage an existential crisis for our field.

BIO: I have a long list of research, teaching, and industry appointments, which currently include Executive Director of the newly-formed Institute for Representation in Society and Media, the Chair of Emerging Media at Kansas State University, and as President of Metro Boston NFL Flag Football.  I am also affiliated faculty with the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University (Denmark) and served as Associate Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Boston University.  In addition, I have also been a leading Digital Experience Management consultant at the International Data Corporation and member of the faculty at Boston University (tenured), the Toulouse School of Economics (France), the University of Melbourne (Australia), and Erasmus University (The Netherlands).

I earned my Ph.D. in media research at Indiana University Bloomington, where I specialized in applied analytics for international, political, and health communication networks and advanced econometric methods. Topically, my areas of expertise now address online and mobile media  technologies as their use may relate to sociopolitical and behavioral health change at the macro (i.e., national) and  micro (as in individual) levels. My work also include analyses of sports and media marketing content along with user influence in social media campaigns that drive engagement, participation, and revenue.

Put simply, I put my academic research to the test everyday with media marketing analytics efforts that build programs and drive millions in ongoing, annual revenue across industry verticals.  Looking for a consultant? I make it easy deploy and engage a blend of interpretive as well as relatively advanced AI-driven statistical tools for network analysis, forecasting, and explaining where and how the use of media has shaped public opinion and global events, in particular as it relates to political and health decision making.

If you are wondering, no – social media and fake news did not elect Trump, and in nearly all cases people are not trapped in ideological filter bubbles, based on the evidence my colleagues and I found in this study and this study.

A mostly up-to-date selection of my peer-reviewed publications appear below. Many are open access, but for those articles that are behind paywalls, please feel free to message me for access as well as with feedback and questions, or for media and speaking requests.  I truly love what I do, and I look forward to hearing from you to help make the world a better place.

website: https://jacobgroshek.com/

Theofilos Gkinopoulos, Jagiellonian University

Are citizens of resilient states also resilient to conspiracy theories? The association between state resilience and COVID-19, climate change related and generic conspiracy beliefs

In the era of high uncertainty and complexity, building resilient systems against threats, crises and disasters is of utmost importance. Empirical research across several decades has provided robust evidence about the important benefits of resilience on an individual level (e.g., as a personality trait or a coping strategy that individuals use to deal with personal adversities, traumas and losses). Building resilience seems to protect people from uncertainty, which is a strong predictor of believing in conspiracy theories which, in turn, function as devices that ameliorate this sense uncertainty. And this is why conspiracy theories and their endorsement flourishes in contexts of high uncertainty. While the association of individual resilience with conspiracy beliefs is already documented in the literature, much less is known about the association of conspiracy beliefs with resilience as a characteristic of states. At the moment, there is evidence showing that individuals’ high sense of resilience predicts less intentions to endorse conspiracy theories. Extending individual resilience to resilience on the level of a state has proven to be a crucial factor for effective crisis management and a yet understudied macro-level factor that can predict conspiracy beliefs. To this end, bringing the concept of state resilience to the social psychological literature of conspiracy beliefs, we conducted three studies with different sample of participants each (N = 44,318 participants nested in 51 countries, N = 298 UK participants and N = 283 UK participants). Results showed that higher scores of the state resilience index (Study 1) and higher perceived state resilience (Studies 2 and 3) predicted lower climate change related and generic conspiracy beliefs. The importance of state resilience in the social psychological and policy-making domain of misinformation is discussed. This seminar will begin with introducing the concept of state resilience as an extension of individual resilience. During the seminar, a detailed description of the country-level and individual-level measure of state resilience will be provided, as well as the reasons why a highly resilient state and, subsequently, perceptions of a state as highly resilient can be negative predictors of various types of conspiracy theories (COVID-19, climate change related, and generic conspiracy beliefs). The seminar will close with potential useful policy making recommendations regarding the crucial role of resilience on a state level as the necessary tool to fight the rise of conspiracy theories and beliefs in conditions of high uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Bio: Theofilos Gkinopoulos is an assistant professor at the Behavior in Crisis Lab-Institute of Psychology of the Jagiellonian University and a visiting lecturer in mixed methods at the University of Warsaw (Faculty of Psychology). He has obtained his BSc in Psychology from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Greece and a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Surrey (UK). He conducted postdoctoral research at the Centre for Inequalities of the University of Greenwich (UK) and the Department of Political Sciences (University of Crete). His current research focuses on understanding the intradividual and intergroup antecedents and consequences of people’s beliefs, including conspiracy beliefs, and behaviors in times of crises. He has also been guest (co)editor of three special issues on intergroup apologies, morality and social norms.

Maria Lewicka, Institute of Psychology, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Meaningful places: Implications for place attachment, aesthetic judgements, and reactions to urban changes

Place is a meaningful location. Geographical coordinates and material aspects alone do not create places; rather, it is the personal and cultural meanings assigned to them that do. Human geographers hold different views on what makes specific locations meaningful. In this presentation I will confront two different approaches to meaningful places, phenomenological and constructivist, anchored in writings of human geographers and architects. I will distinguish between different sets of place features, essentialist and anti-essentialist (the terms corresponding to different underlying philosophies) that make locations meaningful and distinguish them from meaningless non-places. I will show implications of this distinction for people’s affective reactions to places, their emotional bonds with places, aesthetic judgments, and reactions to changes introduced to urban settings. I will show implications of this approach for the theory of essentialism of artifacts and its affinity with theories of environmental aesthetics and urban planning.

BIO: Maria Lewicka is a professor of social and environmental psychology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Her former interests included cognitive issues such as categorization behavior, human rationality, cognitive biases and errors related to pragmatics of behavior. Her current research focuses on the relationships between urban settings and people’s behaviors, emotions, and cognitions, particularly exploring place attachment, place identity, place memory, and theories of place and people-place relations. She has published in journals such as the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Environment and Behavior, Cities, and Political Psychology, among others. Additionally, she is the author of the book “Psychologia miejsca” (Psychology of Place). She was an editor and associate editor of several Polish and international journals, including the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Ben Stanley, SWPS University

Democratic hypocrisy in practice: a panel study of revealed preferences for liberal democracy in Poland

While substantial attention has been paid to the role of political elites in engineering democratic backsliding, we know less about how citizens of democracies resist or enable this process. Recent research suggests that citizens may be “democratic hypocrites” who declare a partisan willingness to overlook breaches of liberal democratic norms, yet we have had little opportunity to observe whether this hypocrisy manifests itself in political choices. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a panel survey spanning Poland’s transition from illiberalism to the restoration of a pro-liberal-democratic government, I examine the nature of citizens’ revealed preferences for liberal democracy. Results show that contrary to expectations, Polish citizens’ propensity to punish or reward illiberal candidates is not significantly affected when power changes hands, even when they are highly affectively polarised. However, it is significantly moderated by socio-cultural ideological alignment, suggesting that ideological cross-pressures may play a greater role in undermining liberal democracy.

BIO: Ben Stanley is an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University. Educated as a political scientist, he received his PhD from the University of Essex and has worked at the Institute of Public Affairs in Bratislava, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw and the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. He is currently carrying out research on the politics of populism, illiberalism and authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe and is completing a monograph (co-authored with Stanley Bill) on the eight years of “good change” under the Law and Justice party in Poland.

Gilad Hirschberger, Reichman University

The past is never dead. It’s not even past

In his famous saying, William Faulkner suggested that the past continues to exert a powerful and lasting effect on the present. This seminar, inspired by Faulkner, will examine how history, and especially the history of trauma, continues to cast a long shadow on the present, and will show why we can’t just let bygones be bygones. Specifically, I will focus on how the memory of the Holocaust has three main influences: a. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict; b. Intergroup relations between Jews/Israelis, Germans, and other European groups; c. The way Europe is dealing with the current immigration crisis. The research that I will present will focus on two main issues. The first, is the attributions that people make for why the Holocaust happened. Is it because of an essential German evil or obedient character, or is it because of external circumstances such as the Versailles Agreement and hyperinflation in Germany? The second, is how do other European groups represent their history during WWII? Were they victims? Did they save their Jewish populations, or did they collaborate with the Nazis either by choice or by force? We will discuss research that demonstrates how people oscillate between defensive representations and a more nuanced and complex understanding of history.

BIO: Gilad Hirschberger is professor of social and political psychology at Reichman University, Israel, Associate Dean of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, and co-director of the T-Politography project. His work focuses on collective existential threats, and on how threat perceptions influence and shape political cognitions. This work is guided by a multidimensional model of existential threats that he recently developed. In his research, he focuses on threats located in the past that cast a long shadow on the present, such as the memory of collective trauma, as well as on the perception of threats looming in the future, such as the Iranian nuclear threat. This research also distinguishes between threats of commission that are immediate and local (e.g., terrorism) and threats of omission that are universal and slow to develop (e.g., climate change; viral pandemic). Studying populations worldwide, he shows that the perception of these threats is contingent on political ideology such that liberals and conservatives perceive certain threats while ignoring others. Prof. Hirschberger also conducts applied research for various non-government organizations. This research, aiming to define the parameters of a sustainable agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, includes opinion polls and experimental surveys conducted on the general Israeli population and on specific West-Bank settler populations. He occasionally writes for magazines and newspapers in Israel (Haaretz, YNet, Alaxon) and the US (Washington Post).

PhD Sabina Čehajić-Clancy, Stockholm University

The impact of social context on intergroup reconciliation

The recent surge in intergroup conflicts around the globe emphasizes the importance of finding ways to improve relations between adversary groups, ultimately paving the way towards conflict resolution and reconciliation. By following these societal demands, social psychologists have long sought to understand processes that may facilitate intergroup reconciliation. However much of the research has primarily centered on individual-level processes whilst overlooking the impact of social context. In this talk, I will talk about two important recent shifts within the social psychology of intergroup reconciliation: 1) a focus on the role of contextual versus individual intergroup contact, and 2) the development of evidence-based intergroup interventions designed to promote intergroup reconciliation. Finally, and drawing on empirical evidence from diverse conflict settings, I will explore specific pathways for advancing research and practice of intergroup interventions aimed at conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation.

BIO: Dr. Sabina Čehajić-Clancy works as a Professor of Social Psychology at Stockholm University where she leads a research group on Intergroup Relations and Social Change. She is an expert on psychology of conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation with a special focus on social-psychological approaches aimed at improving relations between groups in conflict. Currently, she is working on examining the impact of social context on intergroup interventions effectiveness and durability in order to design effective interventions which would fit a variety of different social contexts. For more information, visit https://www.su.se/english/research/research-groups/intergroup-relations-and-social-change

Hirotaka Imada, Royal Holloway, University of London

Intergroup Cooperation and Aggression

Are humans inherently predisposed to cooperate with ingroup members and act aggressively towards outgroup members, even in the absence of instrumental reasons? While it is tempting to assume that ingroup cooperation and outgroup aggression are two sides of the same coin, empirical evidence from psychology, economics, and evolutionary science challenges this view: Research has consistently demonstrated that while people indeed act cooperatively towards those sharing the group membership, outgroup membership does not necessarily provoke aggression. In this lecture, I will discuss recent empirical findings on the psychological processes underlying ingroup cooperation as well as the minimal condition under which outgroup aggression emerges.

This lecture mainly discusses findings from studies using economic games, which are widely used to stylise, abstract, and measure a range of social behaviours such as cooperation and aggression.

BIO: Hiro is a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a visiting associate professor at the Research Institute for Future Design at the Kochi University of Technology. He completed his BA at Sophia University in Japan and MSc (by research) and PhD at University of Kent in the UK. After finishing his PhD, he worked at Kochi University of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow.

His academic interests lie in social and evolutionary psychology and he is interested in understanding cooperation especially in intergroup contexts. He has been undertaking a wide range of projects and he addresses questions such as how indirect reciprocity guides (intergroup) cooperation, why people gossip and how it facilitates prosociality within/across group boundaries, and how we can promote intergenerational and post-disaster cooperation.

He likes talking and doing nonsense with his friends and he also enjoys playing jazz. When he was younger, he traveled abroad by himself with his trumpet and hit local jam sessions in many countries. He currently plays for the Runnymede Jazz Orchestra and a regular participant of the Woods Shed Jazz Club.

Elias Dinas, European University Institute

Mating Market Competition and Gender Norms

We study norms regulating socially acceptable female behavior and how between-group competition in the mating market shapes their development. We focus on a case study featuring an inflow of ethnic Greek refugees arriving from Turkey following the Greco-Turkish conflict in the early 20th century and examine how the composition of the incoming refugee population influenced local gender norms. We leverage the fact that many male refugees were captured or executed before emigrating, resulting in a female-skewed refugee population, thereby triggering a competition shock in the mating market. At the time, prevailing norms stigmatized women living outside male-headed households, making female refugees vulnerable to stereotypes of low moral standards. For a sufficient level of competition, an individual from the local population has an incentive to double down on conservative gender norms as a means of undermining the reputation of the newcomer competitors, even if this does not align with their true preferences. Specifically, individuals invested in the mating prospects of local women—whether for themselves or their families—benefitted from emphasizing female ‘purity’ as a valued trait, as doing so amplified their comparative advantage over the morally stigmatized competition. We hypothesize that this, in turn, led to an increased value placed on conservative values signaled by female behavior. To study this idea, we exploit the variation in the gender composition of refugees in each locality as a proxy for the intensity of competition relying on the as-good-as-random allocation of refugees across Northen Greece. We combine data from multiple censuses; marriage registries; and a fine-tailored survey to test our proposed mechanism against competing explanations for the observed patterns.

BIO: Elias Dinas holds the Swiss Chair in Federalism, Democracy and International Governance. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the European University Institute (2010) and his research interests include the dynamics of political socialization, the downstream effects of institutional interventions and the legacy of authoritarian rule on the ideological predispositions of citizens in new democracies. He has also a keen interest in research methodology. His work has been published, among others, in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis and mentioned in The Economist, the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Vicente Valentim, IE University

The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand

Radical-right behavior is increasing across Western democracies, often very fast. Previous research has shown, however, that political attitudes and preferences do not change this fast. This book argues that, to understand these patterns, one needs to appreciate the crucial role of social norms as drivers of political behavior. It builds on a norms-based theory of political supply and demand, arguing that growing radical-right behavior is driven by individuals who already held radical-right views, but who did not act on them because they thought that they were socially unacceptable. If these voters do not express their preferences, politicians can underestimate how much latent support there is for radical-right policy. This leaves the radical right with less skilled leaders, who are unable to mobilize even radical-right voters to support them. However, if politicians realize that there is more private support for radical-right policy than is typically observable, they have an incentive to run for election on a radical-right platform and mobilize silent radical-right views. Their electoral success, in turn, makes radical-right individuals become more comfortable showing their views, and impels more politicians to join the radical right. The argument of the book makes us rethink how political preferences translate into behavior, shows how social norms affect the interaction of political supply and demand, and highlights how a political culture that promotes inclusion can erode.

BIO:

Website: https://www.vicentevalentim.com/

I am an assistant professor of political science at IE University. I earned my PhD at the European University Institute in July 2021. Before joining IE, I was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, of which I remain an associate member.

I study what citizens think is acceptable to do in a democracy, why that is, and how it changes.

My book on social norms and the normalization of the radical right came out with Oxford University Press in 2024. It has been listed as one of the books of the year by the Financial Times and by Piedras de Papel.

My articles have been published in  The Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and British Journal of Political Science, among other academic journals.

My work been discussed in media outlets like the Financial Times, the Guardian, or CNN.

In this website you can find further information about my research agenda, a list of my publications, and a description of my book.

You can also look into my Google Scholar profile or follow me on Bluesky @valentimvicente.bsky.social.