PhD studentship in Psychology to work with the project ID-Compression, University of Limerick, Ireland. Deadline: 10 July 2025.
There are 2 studentships available for this project; the one that is most likely of interest to followers of this Center is for a PhD in Social Sciences with an interest in Social Identity.
The ERC-funded ID-COMPRESSION project explores the idea that issue-based polarization is information compressibility, where attitudes provide redundant (i.e. compressible) information about groups and identity. This framework conceptualizes people holding attitudes as a social information system where people are located by their own attitudes and can easily locate each-other in the social system from a few expressed attitudes. The more compressible the social information system, the fewer bits of information are required to locate people within it. These ideas flow from the social identity and social representations approaches to attitudes. Team members are particularly excited to explore conversion pathways where, they hypothesize, people’s willingness to adopt an idea will depend on their current location in the social information system. The PhD candidates will work as part of this team testing these ideas with secondary data, social experiments and simulations. They will particularly explore whether and how information becomes compressible when it is passed through simple social networks, whether social information compression maps to polarization (e.g. that people compress social information more in highly polarized contexts), and will experimentally test the concept of conversion pathways. Applied mathematicians in the group will develop metrics and methods for estimating compressibility, and for mapping it to other measures of polarization
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 