Francesco is a senior lecturer at the Department of Psychology at City, University of London (UK). His current research focuses on applying computational modelling to explore topics in cultural and political psychology such as ideology, religion, and ethics. Email: francesco.rigoli@city.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Rigoli, F. (2021). A computational perspective on faith: religious reasoning and Bayesian decision. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 11(2), pp. 147–164.

• Rigoli, F. (2021). Masters of suspicion: A Bayesian decision model of motivated political reasoning. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

• Rigoli, F. (2021). Political motivation: A referent evaluation mathematical model. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 9(1), pp. 8–23.

• Rigoli F. (2021) The psychology of ultimate values: a computational perspective. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Jens is an assistant professor in psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). He works on how people are persuaded to change their beliefs as well as how individual, social, and systemic factors interact with each other to shape individual and collective beliefs and behaviours. Jens also tests how interventions such as policy change, information campaigns, and economic incentives impact complex human-environment systems. He works with different methodological approaches including qualitative interviews, experimental cognitive psychology as well as Bayesian and agent-based modelling. Amongst other topics, he has published on micro-targeting, discriminatory reasoning, and echo chamber formation. Email: j.madsen2@lse.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Pilditch, T. & Madsen, J. K. (2021). Targeting your preferences: Modelling micro-targeting for an increasingly diverse electorate, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 24 (1)

• Madsen, J. K. (2019). The Psychology of Micro-Targeted Election Campaigns. Palgrave Macmillan

• Madsen, J. K. (2019). Voter Reasoning Bias when Evaluating Statements from Female and Male Election Candidates, Politics & Gender 15 (2), 310-355

• Madsen, J. K., Bailey, R. M. & Pilditch, T. (2018). Large networks of rational agents form persistent echo chambers, Scientific Reports 8:12391, 1-8

Max is a research scientist at the tech startup Symudyne and has previously worked as researcher at University College London. His research focusses on how people change their (political) views based on new information, how (mis-) information spreads on social media and how these processes contribute to radical and polarized political beliefs. To address these questions he uses a range of methods, including behavioral modeling, neuroimaging, agent-based modeling and larger real-world data sets from social media. Email: max.rollwage.16@alumni.ucl.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Schulz, L.*, Rollwage, M.*, Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2020). Dogmatism manifests in lowered information search under uncertainty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(49), 31527-31534.

• Rollwage, M., Zmigrod, L., de-Wit, L., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2019). What underlies political polarization? A manifesto for computational political psychology. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(10), 820-822.

• Rollwage, M., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2018). Metacognitive failure as a feature of those holding radical beliefs. Current Biology, 28(24), 4014-4021.

Sung-youn is an associate professor of political science at Konkuk University (South Korea). His research interest centers on how people obtain, store, retrieve, and use information to make political judgment and choice. In particular, he has been working on computational, political information-processing models of how people form and revise political attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs. Email: syounkim@konkuk.ac.kr

Key publications:

• Kim S. (2020). Computational Models of Political Decision Making. Oxford Research Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press.

• Kim S. (2012). A Model of Political Information-Processing and Learning Cooperation in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Journal of Theoretical Politics 24(1): 46-65.

• Kim S. (2011). A Model of Political Judgment: An Agent-based Simulation of Candidate Evaluation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 14(2) 3.

• Kim, S., Taber, C. & Lodge, M. (2010). A Computational Model of the Citizen as Motivated Reasoner: Modeling the Dynamics of the 2000 Presidential Election. Political Behavior 32(1): 1 - 27.

Yoshihisa Kashima is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. His interest in the role of ideologies in public opinion dynamics stems from his broader interest on cultural dynamics – the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time, with particular emphasis on culture of sustainability. He has written more than 200 academic articles, including those published in journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, American Psychologist, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He was Associate Editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the President of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. Email: ykashima@unimelb.edu.au

Key publications:

• Kashima, Y. & Fernando, J. (2020). Utopia and ideology in cultural dynamics. Current Opinion in Behavioral Science, 34, 102-106.

• Kashima, Y., Perfors, A., Ferdinand, V., & Pattenden, E. (2021). Ideology, communication, and polarization. Proceedings of the Royal Society Philosophical Transaction B.

• Koudenburg, N. & Kashima, Y. (accepted 19/6/21). A polarized discourse: Effects of opinion differentiation and structural differentiation on communication. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Sven is a postdoctoral associate at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He uses mathematical and computational tools to better understand the socio-cognitive processes involved in collective opinion formation. Sven pursues fundamental research on the role that basic mechanisms of social reward and information processing play in massive computer mediated interaction on opinions. Email: sven.banisch@universecity.de

Key publications:

• Banisch, S. & Shamon, H.. (2021). Biased processing and opinion polarisation: experimental refinement of argument communication theory in the context of the energy debate.

• Banisch, S. & Olbrich, E.. (2019). Opinion polarization by learning from social feedback. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 43 (2), 76-103

• Banisch, S., & Olbrich, E. (2021). An Argument Communication Model of Polarization and Ideological Alignment. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 24 (1) 1

Nicola holds the Vice-chancellor Research Fellowship on “Information Theory for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” at the University of Hertfordshire (United Kingdom). His research is focused on understanding how information is processed by agents with bounded rationality and how such information processing impacts the representations agents have about others and themselves. Currently, he is working on a framework of decision-making with partial observability to model how political agents can acquire beliefs about the society and how these can be artificially shaped by propaganda. Email: n.catenacci-volpi@herts.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Catenacci Volpi, N., & Polani, D. (2020). Goal-directed Empowerment: combining intrinsic motivation and task-oriented behaviour. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE, 2020

• Catenacci Volpi, N. & Polani, D. (2020). Space Emerges from What We Know - Spatial Categorisations Induced by Information Constraints, Entropy 22 (10).

• Catenacci Volpi, N., Quinton, J., & Pezzulo, G. (2014). How active perception and attractor dynamics shape perceptual categorization: a computational model. Neural Networks (60), 1-16.

Dimitri is Associate Professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Milano Bicocca. His research interests span from Robotics and Machine Learning to Computational Neuroscience. Dimitri's work focuses on creating adaptive artificial systems with exploratory skills and active perception capabilities flexible enough to tackle complex social environments (physical or virtual). I also study how these skills are realized in living organisms together with the causes and consequences of their failures.. Email:

dimitri.ognibene@unimib.it

Key publications:

• Ognibene, D., Fiore, V. G., & Gu, X. (2019). Addiction beyond pharmacological effects: the role of environment complexity and bounded rationality. Neural Networks, 116, 269-278.

• Ognibene, D., Taibi, D., Kruschwitz, U., Wilkens, R. S., Hernandez-Leo, D., Theophilou, E., ... & Malzahn, N. (2021). Challenging Social Media Threats using Collective Well-being Aware Recommendation Algorithms and an Educational Virtual Companion. arXiv:2102.04211

• Ognibene, D., & Demiris, Y. (2013). Towards active event recognition. Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Lee is a lecturer in political psychology at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on experimental and computational approaches to studying the political psychology of voters, with a particular focus on immigration and polarization. This includes computational models of polarization, data driven approaches to voter clustering, geographical psychological studies of values that strongly correlate with voting behaviour, and message framing experiments. Lee is particularly interested in how political decision making might be influenced by the choice architecture of different political systems and the role of different cultural norms in different countries. Lee originally started as a researcher in visual neuropsychology, and so is interested in broader theoretical questions about the challenges of employing experimental and computational approaches to our subjective life. Email: lhd26@cam.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Brick, C., Hood, B., Ekroll, V., & de-Wit, L. (2021). Illusory Essences: A Bias Holding Back Theorizing in Psychological Science. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

• Walker, C., O’Neill, S., & De-Wit, L. (2020). Evidence of Psychological Targeting but not Psychological Tailoring in Political Persuasion Around Brexit. Experimental Results, 1, E38.

• Lewis, G. J., & de-Wit, L. (2019). How Many Ways to Say Goodbye? The Latent Class Structure and Psychological Correlates of European Union Sentiment in a Large Sample of UK Adults. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 7(1), 556-576.

Mark Brandt is an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University (USA). His research goal is to understand ideological and moral beliefs – such as political ideology, racism, religious fundamentalism, and moral conviction – and how they structure attitudes and behaviors, how they provide people with meaning, and why people adopt them in the first place. Email: brandt15@msu.edu

Key publications:

• Brandt, M. J. (in press). Measuring the belief system of a person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Brandt, M. J. & Morgan, G. S. (in press). Between-person methods provide limited insight about within-person belief systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Brandt, M. J., & Sleegers, W. W. A. (2021). Evaluating belief system networks as a theory of political belief system dynamics. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 25, 159-185

Flavio Azevedo is a political psychologist, Fulbright fellow, and postdoc at the Social Decision-Making Lab at Cambridge University. His research focuses on ideology, how to measure it, and its role in political behavior and in justifying social and economic injustices. At Cambridge, Flavio focuses on uncovering the ideological basis of anti-scientific attitudes and conspiratorial thinking. Flavio co-founded and directs FORRT—A Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training—an award-winning interdisciplinary community of 350+ early-career scholars aiming to integrate open scholarship principles into higher education and to advance research transparency. Twitter: @Flavio_Azevedo. Email: fa441@cam.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Azevedo, F., Marques, T., & Micheli, L. (2022). In pursuit of racial equality: Identifying the determinants of support for the Black Lives Matter Movement with a systematic review and multiple meta-analyses. Perspectives on Politics.

• Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021). The Ideological Basis of Anti-Scientific Attitudes: Effects of Conservatism, Authoritarianism, Social Dominance, and System Justification. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(4), 518-549.

• Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., Rothmund, T., & Sterling, J. (2019). Neoliberal ideology and the justification of inequality in capitalist societies: Why social and economic dimensions of ideology are intertwined. Journal of Social Issues, 75(1), 49-88.

• Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., & Rothmund, T. (2017). “Making America great again”: System justification in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 3(3), 231-240.

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, a Faculty Affiliate of the LSE International Inequalities institute, and Associate Editor at the British Journal of Psychology. One stream of Jennifer’s research draws on socioecological perspectives to investigate the consequences of material and social adversity on cognitive performance, self-regulation, affect, and decision-making. A second stream of her work applies the framework of social dominance theory to understanding the psychological underpinnings of political attitudes such as egalitarianism and support for populist platforms. Jennifer is increasingly interested in the study of consensual ideologies such as neoliberalism in shaping self construals and social relations, with implications for mental health, socioeconomic polarisation, and political behaviour. Email: j.a.sheehy-skeffington@lse.ac.uk

Key publications:

• Waldfogel, H., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Hauser, O., Ho, A. K., & Kteily, N. S. (2021). Ideology selectively shapes attention to inequality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(14) e2023985118.

• Obradovic, S., Power, S., & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2020). The psychological appeal of populism. Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 125-131.

• Sheehy-Skeffington, J. & Thomsen, L. (2020). Egalitarianism: Psychological and socio-ecological foundations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32: 146-152.

• Sidanius, J., Cotterill, S., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Kteily, N., & Carvacho, H. (2016). Social dominance theory: Explorations in the psychology of oppression. In C. G. Sibley & F. K. Barlow, (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice (149 - 187). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.