Understanding social attitudes: psychological and neural processes underlying attitude formation and change (WelbornBU21PSY)

Understanding others’ social attitudes is critical for navigating the varied social spaces we encounter in everyday life. What are the psychological and neural mechanisms that support the representation of social attitudes, both our own as well as those of other people? This PhD project will employ behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods to explore the encoding, representation, and use of social attitudes. Approaches such as representational similarity analysis (RSA) and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) will be help decode the functional underpinnings that structure attitudes and shape their deployment in reasoning, persuasion, and social influence. A special focus will be the putative overlap between own attitudes and those of others, a source of both valuable social knowledge as well as potentially debilitating biases.

Note: Applicants should submit a research proposal consistent with the project above, in consultation with the supervisor. Applications without a research proposal will not be considered.

For more information on the supervisor for this project, please go here https://people.uea.ac.uk/b_welborn

This is a PhD programme.

The start date is 1st October 2021.

The mode of study is full time or part time.