Eli Schwartz-Yermack

Author: Eli Schwartz-Yermack | Major: Psychology | Semester: Fall 2022

I began working on my project in fall 2021, my junior year. After spending some time working as a research assistant in Dr. Scott Eidelman’s SAPP lab, I knew that I wanted to work with Dr. Eidelman on my thesis. However, I didn’t know what I wanted to research, outside of a broad interest in political psychology. I started by familiarizing myself with the existing research literature on political psychology, in hopes of finding a topic that interested me and some existing research upon which I could build. After many hours of scouring through databases and academic journals, I developed a particular interest in political extremism research. This topic stood out to me as one that might have some real-world implications, given our increasingly divided and polarized political landscape. It soon became apparent to me that there were two main perspectives on political extremism present within the research literature: one which views extremists as more politically informed and engaged than moderates, and one which views extremists as basing their beliefs on surface-level understandings of political issues. I decided that I wanted to do research that would help reconcile these conflicting theories and explain the conflicting results upon which they were based.

I did this using a variable that I came across in my background research which I refer to as preference for explanatory complexity. Explanatory preference for complexity can be defined as the degree to which an individual prefers an explanation of something to be complex in nature as opposed to simple. After noticing that different studies on extremism operationalized political knowledge in different ways, I realized that this could explain the differing results within the existing research. I hypothesized that extremists prefer more simple explanations of political issues, while moderates prefer more complex ones. This would lead to extremists possessing more surface-level political knowledge than moderates, but lacking deeper understanding of how political systems work, just as previous research shows. The goal of my research is to establish this difference in information-seeking patterns between extremists and moderates empirically, thus explaining the differing results of past studies and reconciling the competing views of extremism.

We began collecting data over the summer as part of a pilot study in hopes of having something to submit to present at a conference. Initially, we had trouble finding participants, as there were very few people on campus over the summer. We continued collecting data into the fall semester, at which point we were able to get many more responses. After data was collected and analyzed, we failed to find any significant results. However, I still applied to present my research at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s 2023 annual convention, and my application was accepted! I’ll be traveling to Atlanta to present at the conference in February.

Currently, we’re in the process of collecting data for my main experiment, and we are more hopeful that this one will yield significant results. If our hypotheses are supported after data collection is finished, I am hopeful that our experiment will lead to a paper that will be published.