Principal Investigator
Flavio Azevedo is a Fulbright fellow and a research associate at the Institute for Communication Science (IfKW) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. The main question driving his research is why do some believe that a nation, people, race, gender, or species is justified in dominating, controlling, and exploiting another? He studies the role of ideology and identity in justifying social and economic injustices. Flavio focuses on the psychology of conservatism, which can materialize as an endorsement of inequality, resistance to change, attitudes supporting the maintenance of existing wealth, income, or opportunity gaps, and also as the rejection of access to rights based on gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or species. Flavio has also done work on the psychology underlying neoliberalism, libertarianism, & populism. Flavio co-founded and direct FORRT (https://forrt.org), an award-winning grassroots interdisciplinary international organization aiming to integrate open and reproducible research training into higher-education. He is also interested in —and conduct research on— Survey Methodology, Measurement, & Metascience. Flavio’s scholarship has been published in Nature Human Behavior, Nature Communications, Political Psychology, the Journal of Politics, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Psychological Inquiry, and Journal of Social Issues. Check out his website flavioazevedo.com.
Collaborators
Patrick Forscher is a Post-Doc research at Co-Regulation (CORE) Lab, currently focusing on Meta-science. Previously he studied social disparities and what to do about them. Patrick also has a strong interest in research methods and statistics.
André Kaiser is a Professor of Comparative Politics at University of Cologne, Germany. He is also the Director of Cologne Center for Comparative Politics. His research focuses on Comparative Political Institutions, Federalism, Decentralization and Multilevel Governance, and Party Systems.
Christopher S. Parker is a professor of political science at the University of Washington. He is the author of “Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South” and “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America.” He is currently working on a third book about the forebears of the Tea Party.
Tobias Rothmund is a professor at the Institute for Communication Science (IfKW) at Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. He investigates psychological processes and phenomena in the context of media-mediated communication.
Ben Saunders is an Associate Professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn. His theoretical interests are social identity, optimal distinctiveness theory, social categorization, self-affirmation, stereotype threat, and contingency theory of justice reasoning. Ben’s research interests are stereotype threat, the dual-process model of prejudice, ambivalent sexism, system justification theory, terror management theory, and mortality salience research.
Joshua Tybur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at VU Amsterdam. His work is dedicated to better understanding how people solve some of the fundamental problems of life, including avoiding infectious diseases, obtaining and retaining a mate, and navigating the threats and affordances of interdependence.
Contributors
Leticia Micheli is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Psychology at Leibniz University Hannover. Her research focuses on the investigation of how inequality, scarcity and unfairness influence decision-making. She employs the interdisciplinary approach of Decision Neuroscience, drawing on insights from Psychology, Economics and Neuroscience and using a variety of behavioral and neuroscientific techniques (e.g., functional MRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation) in her research.
Tamara Marques is a research assistant currently doing a masters in Sociology at University of Minho, Portugal. She is interested in Black Lives Matter, Race & Ethnicity, Social Movements and their interplay in Political Behavior. Tamara is currently writing her master thesis on the topic of “To whom do the lives of Blacks matter? Investigating the determinants of support for the Black Lives Matter Movement”