Olaf Borghi

What a week at the IP-PAD meeting in Amsterdam, where our doctoral network met for training and a conference on youth politics!! I also presented a poster on my recent work on young people's future anxiety and political views (read more here: shorturl.at/Rpc0y)! Super grateful for the fun time! :)

Finally, thanks to the European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and UKRI for funding this work, and to all my colleagues in the IP-PAD Doctoral Network (you can find out more about our work on www.ippad.eu)

Facing a dark future: Young people’s future anxiety and political attitudes in the UK and Greece Study finds future anxiety linked to more conservative views among young men, but not young women, in the UK and Greece.

🔍How does young people's anxiety about the future relate to their political attitudes?

Find out in my first PhD paper, just published in the special issue "The Psychology of Pushback" at advances.in/psychology/1...

Huge thanks also to the team at @advances.in: The feedback from the editors, peer-reviewers, and production team was beyond exceptional! Bonus, peer-reviewers get paid for their work, which they more than deserve for the helpful feedback we received!!

This work is the result of a cross-country collaboration with my great colleagues and co-authors from the IP-PAD Doctoral Network Melina Niraki and Ermioni Seremeta, and my amazing supervisors @mtsakiris.bsky.social and Kaat Smets!

Today's younger generations will live the longest with the consequences of current political, societal, and natural crises, but they also have the potential to defend democratic values in the future!

Why this matters: Our findings suggest that understanding the futures that young people imagine—and how they feel about the future—is of considerable political relevance.
🌱 The focus on young people is also particularly important:

🧠 In follow-up analyses, we show how these associations differ not just by gender, but also depending on young people's emotion regulation strategies.

😨 Surprisingly though, future anxiety across genders was also associated with 🚨 stronger support for democratic principles (e.g., equal rights to vote) and greater political participation 🚨

🙍 Our UK data further revealed that only among young men future anxiety was associated with more support for authoritarian principles and lower open-minded thinking

👫 Future anxiety is associated with the ideological gender gap: Young men—but not young women—who are more anxious about the future also report being more politically conservative and right-wing. This results in ideological gender polarisation, but only among young people high in future anxiety!

😨 In times of multiple crises, converging reports show many young people are anxious about the future. Yet how this relates to their political attitudes remains unclear. We here provide insights from survey data from close to 2,000 adolescents in the UK and Greece. Key findings:

Facing a dark future: Young people’s future anxiety and political attitudes in the UK and Greece Study finds future anxiety linked to more conservative views among young men, but not young women, in the UK and Greece.

🔍How does young people's anxiety about the future relate to their political attitudes?

Find out in my first PhD paper, just published in the special issue "The Psychology of Pushback" at advances.in/psychology/1...

thank you for all the extremely helpful papers and blog posts!! so many of them are my go-to resources, and they came out surprisingly often with perfect timing for my work :)

marginaleffects is one of my favourite R packages and this is such a great paper!! extremely recommended, alongside all other papers from the two authors and also the amazing and free Model to Meaning book marginaleffects.com

Rethinking measurement invariance causally Highlights: It is preferable to work with a causal definition of measurement invariance A violation of measurement invariance is a potentially substantively interesting observation Standard tests for measurement invariance rely on strong assumptions Group differences can be thought of as descriptive results

Conceptual graph illustration the central points of the manuscript. A group variable is potentiall connected to a construct of interest which affects items. Measurement invariance is violated if the group variable directly affects the items, for example by modifying the loadings from the construct to the items, or by directly affecting an item

To make this less abstract, consider a scenario where students take an exam, R, meant to capture some ability, T, and then are admitted to a program, V, depending on their exam results: R → V. This is sufficient to result in a violation of the statistical definition of measurement invariance. Exam results and admission are not independent given ability because exam results have a direct effect on admission. Even if we know somebody’s ability (e.g., we know it’s very high), learning about their admission status (e.g., they were not admitted) can tell us something about their exam result (e.g., it may have been worse than expected). According to the causal definition, this in itself does not constitute measurement bias, which seems a sensible conclusion here. After all, the scenario does not involve any reason to believe that the measurement process varied systematically by admission status. Admission happens after the exams took place, it cannot retroactively influence the measurement process (and, for example, lead to unfair treatment depending on admission status).

New paper out with @boryslaw.bsky.social 🥳 In which we sketch out how to rethink measurement invariance causally for applied researchers. And provide a causal definition of measurement invariance!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is incredible work, such an insanely cool paper and findings! Quite alarming that "[post-training and prompting methods that] increased AI persuasiveness [...] also systematically decreased factual accuracy"

In previous work with Manos Tsakiris @mtsakiris.bsky.social , we showed that interoception can act as a buffer against political stress. We now extend this research to the 2024 U.S. Presidential elections, capturing data before and after

Check out our preprint 👇

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The East in wolf’s clothing. Wolf attacks correlate with but do not cause far-right voting The resurgence of wolves in Germany has sparked intense debate, particularly in rural areas where wolf attacks on livestock are frequent. Prior resear…

I'm glad someone did basic due diligence on the wolf paper. (Although - worth noting - PNAS has an impact factor of 9 and Electoral Studies an impact factor of 2: a familiar pattern with replications of fundamentally flawed findings.) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sharing our work at #ISPP in beautiful Prague on affective prescription —and how this shapes the kind of political leader we’re drawn to based on their appearance.
Preprint coming soon!

This book is highly recommended! Bonus is that I genuinely enjoyed working through it when it first came out

Great talk by @olafborghi.com on cognitive control and politically motivated reasoning, even in the face of unexpected interference 👇😂 #ISPP2025

(1/6) #ISPP2025 is just one day away and I can't wait to be in Prague! It will be the first conference I attend during my PhD - looking forward to all the interesting sessions, catching up with friends, and meeting new people! 🤩 #PsychSciSky #polisky #CogSci #polpsy

As one of my favourite colleagues Etienne Roesch just whispered to me in response to a #MetaScience2025 speaker suggesting AI could act as an additional grant reviewer:

A👏I👏is👏not👏an👏analytic👏tool

That’s the correct link :
www.jobs.london.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

IPPAD_ISPP2025 ISPP 2025 Annual Meeting in Prague IP-PAD Program Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence & Democracy Conference days Thursday, 3rd of July 3 10:15-11:30 Gustavo Cout...

(6/6) You can find a curated collection of our contributions to ISPP 2025 here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

(5/6) If you are looking for more interdisciplinary talks bridging cognitive and political sciences and young people's politics, also check out the 15+(!!) contributions from my colleagues from the ippad.eu network, including three full panels

(4/6) It will feature four talks on the involvement of young people in politics, a highly policy-relevant area given the discussions on lowering the voting age where political psychology can make an important contribution! With interdisciplinary discussants @mtsakiris.bsky.social and Kaat Smets

(3/6) Together with amazing collaborators from ippad.eu, I also co-organised Session 127: Young People's Political Agency and Voting Rights - Sunday 8:30 AM. I know, a bit early for the last day of the conference, but I promise that getting out of bed early will be worth it!

(2/6) I'll be presenting and chairing Session 19: Biological and Psychometric Approaches on Thursday 10:15 AM. Come by if you want to hear about my recent preprint on politically motivated reasoning and its cognitive correlates, and more exciting interdisciplinary research! doi.org/10.31234/osf...