Faculty

Paul Freedman (Politics) studies public opinion and political communication. His research focuses on political advertising and its effects on citizens’ attitudes and political behavior (particularly during election campaigns), the nature of ambivalence and public opinion, and the political behavior of elderly citizens in long-term care facilities.

Pete Furia (Politics) examines identities and enmities in international politics. His specific interests include citizen competence in foreign affairs and the determinants of Arab public opinion on foreign relations.

Tom Guterbock (Sociology) is the founding director of the Center for Survey Research. He studies political and public policy issues, citizen satisfaction, social capital, and health issues. He has been involved in over 300 funded survey projects, covering telephone, mail-out, in-person, and internet modes as well as multi-mode projects.  He is currently involved in an interdisciplinary project evaluating the origins and outcomes of the restrictive immigration enforcement policy adopted in Prince William County, Virginia.  He is also using experimental methods to determine why respondents don’t like political ‘message testing’ polls and to recommend ways of improving such polls.

Jonathan Haidt (Psychology) studies the psychological foundations of morality. his research on cultural and cross-national variation in morality led him directly to the study of liberals and conservatives as different cultures, which construct their moralities on different sets of psychological foundations. He runs several projects to study moral psychology, and to promote civility in politics.

David Klein (Politics) studies the decision making of government officials, especially judges, and citizens' attitudes toward the law. He is co-editor, with Gregory Mitchell, of the forthcoming The Psychology of Judicial Decision Making.

Paul Martin (Politics & The Miller Center) studies what motivates citizens to participate in politics and how political elites respond to citizen participation. His recent research shows that bad news about national issues encourages citizens to be more engaged in politics out of a sense of civic duty. He is also interested in how political elites shape the conditions that encourage or discourage citizen engagement.

Brian Nosek (Psychology) directs Project Implicit, an Internet-based multi-university research team studying implicit cognition – thoughts and feelings that exist outside of awareness or control. Nosek’s research interests include implicit cognition, automaticity, social judgment and decision-making, attitudes and beliefs, stereotyping and prejudice, ideology, morality, identity, memory, and the interface between theory, methods, and innovation.

Andrea Press (Media Studies & Sociology) is interested in the way citizens of different social classes, genders, and races use the media in forming their political opinions. She has done a research project on the use of new media during presidential elections, and a longitudinal study of the way women's use of new media affects their social class identities and their political attitudes. Currently she is studying attitudes toward "third-wave" feminism and "postfeminism," and towards its depiction in the media, amongst young women.

Larry Sabato (Politics, and the Center for Politics).

Lynn Sanders (Politics) is pursuing two lines of research connected to political psychology. The first examines the relationship between politics and mental health, including a study of therapeutic communities in the United States and an investigation of the impact of political engagement on psychological well-being. The second addresses how democratic political engagement, especially deliberation between citizens, interrupts and allows citizens to overcome negative racial attitudes.

Vesla Weaver (Politics) studies racial attitudes, racially-inflected candidate evaluations, criminal justice, and how policy shapes citizen attitudes and action. Specifically, she is working on several projects related to political psychology that investigate: how crime has been racialized in media and public discourse, the effect of punitive interventions on citizen's sense of the state and civic belonging, racial polarization across the decades, generational change in racial beliefs, and the disruption of social capital and trust through concentrated community incarceration.

Bruce A. Williams (Media studies) studies the implications of a changing media environment for citizenship in the United States. His new book, After the News: Media Regimes and American Democracy in the New Information Environment (with Michael X. Delli Carpini), examines the changing role of the media in providing useful information to citizens, especially in the areas of political scandals, climate change, and the decision to use military force.

Nick Winter (Politics) studies the ways that citizens' ideas about race and gender relations shape their perceptions of politics. His first book, Dangerous Frames, explores the conditions under which political rhetoric engages these ideas to shape opinion on issues having nothing on their face to do with race or gender. His second book project, currently in progress, explores the ways that explicit and implicit ideas about masculinity and femininity shape modern American political competition.

Graduate Students

Carlee Beth Hawkins (Psychology) studies implicit and explicit manifestations of ideological beliefs and identities, and how these influence social judgment and behavior. Her research concerns people who do not fit into the traditional definition of ideologues, such as Independents, apolitical people, and atheists.

Adam Hughes (Politics) is interested in street-level democracy. He studies the behavior of bureaucrats and the affective qualities of political film and photography.

Calvin Lai (Psychology) studies how ideology influences social judgment and decision-making. He is investigating the intersections between ideology and race/gender in person perception. He is also studying the moral psychology of liberal ideological beliefs.

Nicole Lindner (Psychology) studies how religious and political ideology interact with or influence the formation of and maintenance of implicit biases. In another line of research, she studies how group identification and intergroup attitudes operate among members of stigmatized groups for which the boundaries are both permeable and impermanent, such as age groups.

Matt Motyl (Psychology) studies the role of morality in politics with a particular focus on politically-motivated violence and terrorism. He examines existential factors that incite increased intergroup conflict and the ways in which these existential fears can be calmed to ameliorate intergroup relations. Matt also studies how different moral belief systems impact people's political attitudes and behaviors.

Nicole Pankiewicz (Politics) studies social change and political communication. Her current interests include media portrayals of marginalized political groups such as female candidates and third-party candidates. She is also interested in how elites frame the issue of gay rights and how this framing affects public opinion.

Emily Sydnor (Politics) studies the role of mass media in influencing political behavior, public opinion and public policy. Her current interests include examinations of racial frames in the media and the ways in which these frames affect individuals' assumptions about crime and the criminal justice system; she is also interested in media framing effects on opinion surrounding other social issues such as mental health, homelessness and education.