People - Political Psychology Lab

Current lab members

Lee de-Wit (PI)

Lee originally trained as an experimental psychologist / cognitive neuroscientist but now applies psychology to understand political decision making. In addition to directing the Political Psychology Lab, Lee is Deputy Head of the Department of Psychology, and Director of Undergraduate Education. He is also a Director of Studies for PBS and Staff Fellow at Trinity Hall.

Department Profile Page

Andreas Kapounek (PhD student)

Andreas’ research explores computational complexity in political decision-making. He studies how preference orderings, issue prioritisation and electoral systems affect political choice. Andreas holds master’s degrees in management (HEC Paris) and cognitive science (ENS Paris-PSL) and a bachelor’s degree in business and economics (WU Vienna). He completed his master’s thesis at the Cambridge Political Psychology Lab and conducted research at Sciences Po Paris. He is co-supervised by Professor Peter Bossaerts at the Faculty of Economics. His PhD is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Cambridge Trust.

Lara Greening (PhD)

Lara Greening is doing a PhD exploring how computational methods can help us to understand what drives electoral decision making. She is completing her PhD part time, whilst also working as a data scientists at Nesta. Her PhD is funded by the ESRC.

Lara Greening graduated with an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Behavioural Science from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation focused on the predictors of within-party political polarization in South Africa. Her MPhil research looked at the political psychology of consumer decisions. She also has worked on coordinating the Research Handbook of Nudges and Society edited by Cass Sunstein and Lucia Reisch. Lara is co-supervised by Lucia Reisch, director of the El Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy.

Sonja Belkin (LSE PhD Student)

Sonja is a PhD candidate at LSE supervised by Jens Madsen, co-supervised by Lee de-Wit. She is studying how user psychology, recommender systems, and AI-generated content interact to drive belief polarisation in online information environments. By combining empirical and computational approaches – such as agent-based models – her work explores how emerging technologies, like LLMs, may threaten epistemic security. Her broader research interests lie at the intersection of cognitive psychology, technology, and security, particularly how to design and regulate information ecosystems, to make them resilient to AI-driven manipulation.

Prior to her PhD, Sonja completed an MPhil in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Lee de Wit and Dr David Young. Using Bayesian belief networks, her dissertation examined why we observe greater belief polarisation for social policy issues compared to economic ones. Alongside academic work, while an undergraduate in the PBS department at LSE, Sonja was President of LSE's Behavioural and Psychological Science Society, where she co-launched the UK's first inter-university Behavioural Science Careers Fair with UCL BIS and Warwick BIT, and co-founded Irrationale, LSE's student psychology journal.

Hunter Hoffman (MPhil Student) 

Hunter’s research focuses on how individuals form and update political beliefs, particularly how the perception of populist narratives and group-identity cues can influence political polarisation processes. He aims to contribute to a better understanding of how psychological mechanisms operate within politically charged contexts and to explore the connection between psychological research and broader societal challenges of public interest. With a background in business psychology he holds a double degree from Dublin Business School, Ireland and the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Germany. His MPhil is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Cambridge Trust. His research is supervised by Lee de-Wit.

Emilia De Mattia (LMU Masters Student)

Emilia is a Master’s student in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at LMU Munich. At the Political Psychology Lab, she is conducting her Master’s thesis under the supervision of Lee de-Wit, bringing together her clinical background with the lab’s focus on political psychology. Her research explores how psychological distress, including loneliness, life satisfaction, and perceived well-being, relate to political engagement, efficacy, and voter turnout over time. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, her thesis examines these relationships among adults in the UK. 

David Young (Post-Doc at Birkbeck and Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge)

David Young completed his MPhil and PhD in the Political Psychology Lab at Cambridge, and is now a Post-Doc with Ulrike Hahn investigating threats to deliberation in digital democracy platforms. He remains affiliated with the lab, as an Affiliated lecturer, and as the Lead Researcher on the MHP Polarization Tracker. You can find out more about David (and his beautiful graphs), on his website.

Sam Lloyd is now doing a PhD in environmental psychology at Victoria University. 

Liza Karmannaya is now doing a PhD in computational social science at UCL.