#  Social / CBB Lunch ~ Ashwini Ashokkumar, New York University 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 7, 2024** 

 12:00PM - 01:15PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **William James Hall - 1st Fl Seminar Room 105 ~ Lunch pick-up at 11:45 AM**  



 

 



 

####  [Ashwini Ashokkumar](https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/ashwini-ashokkumar.html) Assistant Professor of Psychology, NYU

 **Topic ~ The Psychological Drivers and Effects of Political Discourse**

 What are the individual and collective psychological processes that shape political discourse? Drawing on evidence from natural language analysis and experiments, I argue that identity processes can impede constructive political deliberation and discussion. Analyzing conversations within large communities of supporters of the 2016 Presidential candidates —Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton— I show that highly identified members of these communities demonstrate a weaker tendency to engage in deliberative thinking or questioning in political conversations, with deliberation being actively discouraged within these communities. I then present experimental evidence that identity processes can eliminate diverse perspectives from political discourse through censorship and self-censorship. Specifically, I find that partisans prioritize their identities over open and civil discourse, censoring both others' and their own identity-incongruent opinions. Importantly, such self-censorship of opinions can subsequently weaken those opinions, eliminating dissent both from public discourse but also from its source—the dissenting individual. In the final part of the talk, I will discuss ongoing work examining how the content and structure of political discourse influence important social and political outcomes —such as political polarization and progressive social change.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cognition, Brain, & Behavior Lunch ](/event-type/cognition-brain-behavior-lunch)
- [ Social Lunch ](/event-type/social-lunch)
- [ Cognition, Brain, & Behavior ](/research-areas/cognition-brain-behavior)
- [ Social Psychology ](/research-areas/social)
 
 

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