Cambridge Political Psychology Lab

The Cambridge Political Psychology Lab attempts to apply insights from psychology to understand real world political decision making. This ranges from computational social psychology approaches (such as the anaysis of the distribution and impact of regional variability in psychological traits, as illustrated above in the maps from James Ackland's work), to experimental psychological studies of cognitive biases, to the impact of different voting systems on the psychology of political decision making. The lab is focused on the empirical study of individual voters (not politicians). The immediate goal of the research program is to put psychological theory and methods to the test in this complex real world domain. The longer term ambition is to help us to think about how the democratic progress can be improved through a better understanding of human psychology.