Research

Our identities are the lenses through which we see and experience the world around us. Our social and political identities shape our thoughts and behaviors, including how we process information, how we talk, what we consider moral, how we behave towards other groups, and even who we vote for. At the same time, our cognition and behavior can also shape our identities. At the WE-search Lab, we strive to study how people’s identities shape, and are in turn shaped by, how they think about, talk about, and do politics.

A central focus of our research is the study of links between language, identity, and group dynamics. Our assumption is that people’s language provides a window into how they see themselves, their own groups, and the groups around them. In our lab, we use a range of interdisciplinary methods including surveys, experiments, natural language analysis, and big data analysis of social media data to study questions like:

When do we express (versus self-censor) our opinions, and how do such behaviors impact our identities?
How do people’s group identities get expressed in their language?
How do our social and political networks shape identity-related motivated reasoning?
Why does divisive rhetoric spread on social media?
How do large-scale upheavals (e.g., the January 6th attack) impact our identities?

Below are some current lines of research.

1. How do our identities shape (and get shaped by) political deliberation, discussion and action?

We are interested in a broad array of questions examining the role of identity processes in engagement with social and political issues: How do identity-related and reputational processes impact political action? Why do some people take an idealistic approach to politics while others are more pragmatic? Why do people sometimes only participate in symbolic ways? We also study questions how about identity shapes political engagement on digital platforms: When and why do we express (or refrain from expressing) our political opinions in conversations, and what are the consequences of such behaviors? What is the nature of our conversations with people who share (vs don’t share) our political opinions? How do our group identities get expressed in our conversations? When and how are we biased in processing political information? In recent work, we analyzed intra-group conversations of partisans on Reddit to identify linguistic markers of group identity. In other work, we’ve examined how people use content moderation tools on social media to eschew ideas that threaten their political identities. In ongoing work, we are examining (a) the consequences of self-censoring opinions in online environments, and (b) the psychological underpinnings of political idealism and pragmatism.

2. How do our identities shape (and get shaped by) intergroup relations?

Our work examines how identity processes can exacerbate (or undermine) intergroup conflict, polarization, and power hierarchies. Which identities bridge (vs. widen) social divides? How does intergroup conflict shape our values? What types of rhetoric do authoritarian leaders use to sway public opinion relating to minority groups? Why does divisive rhetoric spread on social media? We are interested in exploring these questions across diverse political and cultural contexts. For instance, we have studied how partisan identities can exacerbate polarization and authoritarian tendencies in the US, how identities rooted in the local community can encourage honor-based violence against women in India, and how shared values can improve attitudes towards Syrian refugees in Turkey. In new work, we are studying how different meanings associated with the same identities can bridge or exacerbate divisions.

3. How do large-scale events in society shape our cognitive and social lives?

In this line of work, we leverage archival and text analysis methods to study how large-scale events impact who we are and our beliefs about who we are. How do large-scale upheavals shape how we think about ourselves and the world around us? Do collective upheavals bring us together or tear us apart? Do they make us more thoughtful, or do they numb our mind and make us unthinking? Do outgroup-caused disasters (e.g., violent attacks) produce the same or different effects as natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes)? Analyzing naturalistic conversations on social media, we have studied the impacts of large-scale events such as the COVID pandemic, hurricanes, elections, and human-caused tragedies such as the murder of George Floyd. In other work, we are studying how the passage of laws shapes people's beliefs and identities.