Research

Conflict thinking (2023-2024)

Conflict thinking is a generalized perception of societal conflict, that describes the phenomenon that (some) individuals perceive more social conflict, regardless of which groups are perceived to be in conflict. We aim to investigate differences across countries and potential antecedents and repercussions of conflict thinking.

Papers from this project:

1. The Salience of Perceived Societal Conflict in Europe: A 27 Country Study on the Development of a Measure for Generalized Conflict Thinking (Van Drunen et al; Social Indicators Research, 2021)
2. Conflict thinking: Exploring the social basis of perceiving the world through the lens of social conflict (Social Science Research, 2018)

UNDPOLAR (2021-2023)

This is a interdisciplinary and international cooperation between six universities across five countries with researchers in the fields of social psychology, sociology, and political science. It focuses on how polarization can be understood from the perspective of belief systems and identities.

I work in this project as a post-doctoral researcher together with, at the RUG, Toon Kuppens, working with both large-scale international survey data investigating the belief systems of European countries, and with (smaller-scale) survey experiments focusing on the role of identities in polarization and group conflict.

Papers from this project:

1. The nature and structure of European belief systems: Exploring the varieties of belief systems across 23 European countries (European Sociological Review, 2024)
2. Education-based affective attitudes: higher educated-bias is related to more political trust and less populism (Acta Politica, 2024)

Education-based status: exploring the institutional effects of education (2016-2021)

PhD project.
Promotores: Bram Spruyt, Russell Spears, & Toon Kuppens.

An interdisciplinary research project focusing on how educational classification can provide individuals with a sense of social status. It combines sociological and social psychological theories and methods. Primarily it uses the sociological insights in how culture and institutions function (primarily the education institution), and the social psychological insights on social identity and group conflict.

PhD thesis was defended (succcesfully) on September 2 2021.

Published papers in this project:

1. Education-Based Status in Comparative Perspective: The Legitimization of Education as a Basis for Social Stratification (Social Forces, 2019)
2. In the Shadow of the Schooled Society: Feelings of Misrecognition and the Education Ladder (Social Problems, 2021)
3. When and Why People Prefer Higher Educated Politicians: Ingroup Bias, Deference, and Resistance (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2022)

Order Please! (2016)

Master's thesis project where I investigated how the effect of neighborhood characteristics (such as disorder) affects voting for law-and-order parties, and how this effect is shaped by cultural framing, that is, how the prior cultural attitudes of individual residents affect how they interpret neigborhood characteristics such as disorder.

Published papers in this project:

1. Order please! How cultural framing shapes the impact of neighborhood disorder on law-and-order voting (Political Geography, 2018)