Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

Associate Professor in Psychology
New York University Abu Dhabi

New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island P.O. Box 129188 United Arab Emirates

I study how core psychological mechanisms react to socioecological conditions such as resources, power, and group membership, with consequences for political behavior and societal change.

Twitter: @jsskeffington

Bluesky: @jsskeffington.bsky.social

 PIPES LAB RESEARCH

Workstream 1

Poverty, Inequality, and Decision-Making

How do socioeconomic conditions shape decision-making?

Using lab and survey experiments and large-scale panel datasets, we explore how the challenges of scarcity and instability to material and social resources, in addition to wider societal conditions such as extreme economic inequality, affect how people think and behave.

Topics include:

  • The relationship between SES and self-regulation from the perspective of constraints in agency imposed by scarcity and unpredictability in material and social resources;

  • The effect of resource scarcity and low social status on information processing, from the perspective of the rational relocation of cognitive resources to meet pressing needs;

  • The link between SES, social trust, and cooperation (social investment and prosociality), drawing on socio/behavioral ecological perspectives;

  • The link between SES and shame, as moderated by appraisals of society and interactions with social policy institutions;

  • The role of social policy interventions such as universal basic income in addressing the psychological consequences of poverty at its source.

Workstream 2

Foundations of Political Ideology and Behavior

Where do our preferences for different political platforms ultimately come from?

Drawing on evolutionary, anthropological, historical, and political insights, we explore the origins of our political preferences, moving beyond left-right ideology to investigate the core relational templates that people apply to their societies. We use cross-national surveys, panel surveys, administrative registry data, experimental, and multivariate behavioral genetic analyses to delineate the evolutionary and socioecological foundations of ideology and political behavior.

Topics include:

  • Individual and cross-national variation in anti-egalitarianism as it is expressed through social dominance orientation (SDO), conceived of as a ‘basic grammar of social power’ in line with social dominance theory;

  • The relevance of core relational models of communality, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality, to debates around resource distribution in society;

  • What the genetic foundations of individual differences in ideological orientations and related attitudes can reveal about their latent structure and adaptive function;

  • The relationship between subjective perceptions of exclusion and status deprivation on political ideology, policy attitudes, and voting behavior;

  • The socioecological foundations of ideology, with a focus on how ecological conditions such as resource scarcity and appropriability (e.g. through patchiness) may shape the emergence of hierarchy-relevant adaptive behavioral strategies;

  • The development of sociopolitical attitudes in the young adult years in a multicultural university setting (NYU Abu Dhabi: see the WeAreNYUAD Survey project);

  • Challenges to liberal democracy revealed by the study of the psychology of totalitarianism.

WORKSTREAM 3

Political Economy in psychological perspective

What is the relationship between citizen, state, and polity in the context of advanced capitalism?

This emergent stream of research aims to bridge the gap between the fields of social psychology and political economy, drawing on a historical, comparative, and institutionalist lens to understand social behavior in societal contexts, and to consider the psychological viability of differing ‘varieties’ of capitalism. We are currently applying this to understand the psychological dimension of market logic in contrast to narratives of solidarity and the common good.

Topics include:

  • The basic social psychological mechanisms shaping the relationship between the citizen and the state, as manifested in expectations for social mobility and progress;

  • The permeation of the principles and values of free market capitalism from the political and economic into the subjective realm, shaping our sense of self and social relations, with downstream consequences for political engagement, socioeconomic marginalization, and youth mental health;

  • Alternative orientations toward the polity grounded in notions of solidarity, collective resources, and the common good;

  • The relationship between communal and exchange relations in the context of feminist critiques of capitalist logic;

  • How ‘insider-outsider’ dynamics are evolving in advanced economies, as exemplified through notions of the ‘liberal elite’ versus those ‘left behind’ by globalization, and how they shape democratic sentiment and electoral backlash.