Here are some of the research questions we’re tackling these days:

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What are the most basic psychological ingredients of a person’s political ideology? What intrapersonal propensities and interpersonal/social forces make liberals and conservatives think, feel, judge, and act in vastly different ways? Can entrenched partisanship and polarization ever give way to mutual understanding and respect?

 

How do people who come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (or “social class”) and people like me (Spike) who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds differ in their implicit assumptions about what they can accomplish, who they are as a person, and how to interact with others? How do these assumptions influence what type of policies they vote for or against?  

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Can we get antivaxxers to just take the vaccine please? More broadly, what can we do to reduce the increasingly widespread problem of antiscience?

 

What are the mechanisms by which children learn moral intuitions? How do the words and sentences they hear from their caretakers and friends scaffold the development of their moral understanding? And perhaps even their political orientation and voting preferences down the road?

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How is technology changing cognition? How are people distributing their cognitive activity between their internal mental processes and external digital tools? What is the most scientifically productive way to think about “the mind”? Is it just about the processes that happen in your head, or should it encompass processes that happen in your body (which is always connected to your head), or should it even include the dynamic interplay between processes inside your human envelope (brain and body) and processes in your physical environment (tools and space)?

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