My research focuses on political psychology and political communication around issues involving social identities. This means examining public opinion, media coverage, and political rhetoric--and the relationships among these--in substantive domains such as immigration, integration of religious and ethnic minorities, and gender and politics. Methodologically, I am interested in combining traditional tools of political psychological research with new forms of computer-assisted content analysis of textual data. Substantively, one strand of my research combines public opinion with corpus linguistic research on media coverage of migration and related issues, in an effort to understand the sources of citizens’ implicit beliefs about immigrants and refugees. Another line of research looks at the impact of social norms against prejudice--and individual motivation to follow these norms. I find that these norms and motivations shape shapes attitudes toward diversity and related policies, and also limit responsiveness to attempts to mobilize hostility toward outsiders in service of radical right-wing political movements.
