Research

How do we come to understand our position in society, and how does this affect how we behave? What kind of a ‘we’ is society anyway? Whether through luxuries brandished on television, political debates on social media, or homelessness visible on the walk to work, the dynamics of unequal societies permeate our everyday experience. My research goal is to harness the methods and theory of basic psychological science to shed light on the mutual influence of self and society, with implications for addressing issues of real-world consequence. I explore how our intuitive sensitivity to groups, hierarchy, and ecological constraints interacts with the social and economic contexts in which we find ourselves, in ways that matter for how we feel, think, and interact.

See Publications for links to papers 

Developing a conceptual and empirical framework for the psychology of low socioeconomic status

Building on insights from sociology, public health, and behavioural economics, I apply the tools of experimental psychology to study the long-standing association between low income and suboptimal behaviours, such as unhealthy food choices and risky borrowing. Going beyond past accounts of the supposed irrationality or defective values of the poor, I focus on components of the psychological situation of low socioeconomic status that might play out similarly in any of us . My work has shown that experimentally exposing a middle income sample to scarcity in resources leads to a decrease in perceived personal control, which in turn drives down perceptions of health efficacy. Subsequent work demonstrates that being scarce in one resource (food) triggers lower cognitive performance only in tasks unrelated to that resource, but no decrement (and perhaps and improvement) in tasks involivng resource-relevant stimuli. In line with perspectives from behavioural ecology (e.g. Pepper & Nettle, 2014) and evolutionary developmental psychology (e.g. Frankenhuis et al., 2016), I am developing a socio-ecological framework to understand responses to poverty and adversity in terms not of psychological deficit, but of a 'psychological shift', which may have been adaptive in situations of real resource scarcity in our ancestral environment.

This framework considers not only absolute income but also relative income, in line with the centrality of status and hierarchy position in contemporary and evolutionary environments. In five studies, I have shown how explicit and implicit experimental manipulations of low perceived socioeconomic status lead to decreased sense of power, which in turn depresses one's perception of personal control over life outcomes. Moving from self-evaluations to objective performance, I have obtained evidence from online, student, and low income samples that low perceived socioeconomic status impairs performance on neuropsychological measures of cognitive functioning, as well as complex financial decisions that rely on it. Applying a 'psychological shift' approach, I have since found that this effect can be mitigated through status-relevant reframing of cogntive tasks, suggestive of a modulation, as opposed to an impairment, of cognitive resources in response to status threats.

In more recent work with my PhD students, I am exploring (1) the role of government social policies in attentuating the disempowering impact of poverty (with Iván Cano-Gomez), (2) affective responses to life under socioeconomic strain (with Iván Cano-Gomez), (3) the role of material constraints in real-life future oriented decision-making (with Julia Buzan), and (4) the link between material and social adversity and consequences for decision-making (with Julia Buzan).

My research in this stream has been funded by the NSF/Harvard Kennedy School Multidisiplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative on Mind, Brain and Behaviour, the Tobin Project, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (the latter via a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship, 2015-2017).

I am keen to channel insights from this research toward addressing the pressing social problems found to accompany the modern persistence of poverty and inequality. Toward this end, I contributed to the World Development Report 2015 (Mind, Society, Behaviour) as part of a team investigating the psychology of poverty in a six-nation survey, published a chapter (with Johannes Haushofer) in a UNDP report on the psychology of poverty, and worked with the British Psychological Society in applying insights from this work into addressing poverty and social class-based discrimination. I am also working on investigating the generalisability of my work to Global South contexts as an Associate of the Community Engagement Centre at the Indus Hospital & Health Network (Karachi, Pakistan), and through a collaboration with Monisha Dhingra on the intersection of caste and SES in India (funded by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).

Relevant publications

Rickett, B., Easterbrook, M., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Reavey, P., & Woolhouse, M. (2022). Psychology of social class-based inequalities: Policy implications for a revised (2010) UK Equality Act. The British Psychological Society. Available at https://www.bps.org.uk/tackling-social-class-inequalities.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2021). Taking context seriously. The Psychologist, 34, 50-53. Link (open access)

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2020). The effects of low socioeconomic status on decision-making processes. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33: 183-188.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2019). Inequality from the bottom up: Toward a ‘psychological shift’ model of decision-making under socioeconomic threat. In J. Jetten and K. Peters (Eds) Social Psychology of Inequality, (pp. 213-231). New York, NY: Springer.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2018). Decision-making up against the wall: A framework for understanding the behavioural dimension of low socioeconomic status. Invited chapter in A. Uskul & S. Oishi, (Eds) Psychology & the Socioeconomic Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. & Rea, J. (2017). How poverty affects people's decision-making processes. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 

Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Sidanius, J., & Price, M. E. (2016). Decision-making at the bottom of the hierarchy: The cognitive impact of perceiving oneself as low in socioeconomic status. Flash-talk delivered to the Society of Personality and Social Psychology Pre-Conference on the Emerging Psychology of Social Class, San Diego, CA.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2015). Behavioural insights in the age of austerity: How the new ‘psychology of poverty’ can help us to stay focused on society. Angle Journal, 13

Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Haushofer, J. (2014). The Behavioural Economics of Poverty. In Barriers to and Opportunities for Poverty Reduction: Prospects for Private Sector Led-Interventions. Istanbul: UNDP Istanbul International Center for Private Sector in Development.

EXPLORING the psychological antecedents and consequences of preferences for or against inequality

Drawing on Social Dominance Theory, I study differences in ideological positioning in terms of adaptive strategies for navigating group-relevant resource dilemmas.

I was part of the team that developed the latest version of the most widely used measure of egalitarianism in political psychology, the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale. With Lotte Thomsen and others at the University of Oslo, I have since explored the genetic underpinnings of egalitarianism, exloring the extent to which the genetic basis of the link between SDO and resource allocation policies might reflect a heritable ‘behavioural syndrome’ for navigating social hierarchies that follows in adaptive logic in its responsiveness to familial, social, and societal experiences. Through our affiliation with the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at Aarhus University, Lotte and I (working with Lau Lilleholt) are launching a longitudinal survey to be matched with Danish administrative registry data, in order to assess the link between fundamental relational orientations (toward communality, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality) and social and political atittudes, behaviours, and outcomes.

I also examine the downstream impact of egalitarianism, uncovering how it shapes voter behaviour and perceptions of inequality. Denise Baron (PhD student), Benjamin Lauderdale (UCL) and I have demonstrated the key role of egalitarianism, alongside authoritarianism and national identification, in driving the phenomenon of voter homophily. This stream of work suggests that when we vote for political leaders who are like us, it’s because we’re looking for people who want to bring about the kind of social world we want—an intuitive claim that nevertheless goes against standard assumptions in political science. In work with with Nour Kteily and Hannah Waldfogel (Northwestern University), Arnold Ho (University of Michigan), and Oliver Hauser (University of Exeter), I found that the more opposed one is to social inequality, the more attuned one is to inequality-relevant information in a range of visual and verbal stimuli, a case of motivated attention that seems to evade conscious effort (see video summary on the right). With Jonathan Mijs at Harvard University and Julia Buzan (PhD student), I have since investigated how this pattern plays out in terms of noticing cues of inequality in one’s everyday life.

RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS

Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Thomsen, L. (In Press). Ideology as a Moral-Relational Language. Psychological Inquiry.

Baron, D., Lauderdale, B., & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2023). A leader who sees the world as I do: Voters prefer candidates whose statements reveal matching social psychological attitudes. Political Psychology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12891

Waldfogel, H., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Hauser, O., Ho, A. K., & Kteily, N. S. (2021). Ideology selectively shapes attention to inequality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(14) e2023985118

Sheehy-Skeffington, J.* & Thomsen, L.* (2020). Egalitarianism: Psychological and socio-ecological foundations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 32: 146-152.

Kleppestø, T. H., Czajkowski, N. O., Vassend, O., Røysamb, E., Eftedal, N. H., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Kunst, J. R., & Thomsen, L. (2019). Correlations between social dominance orientation and political attitudes reflect common genetic underpinnings: A twin study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (36) 17741-17746.

Baron, D., Sheehy-Skeffington, J. & Kteily, N. S. (2018) Ideology and perceptions of inequality. In B. Rutjens and M. J. Brandt (Ed.s) Belief Systems and the Perception of Reality. Routledge.

Price, M. E., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Sidanius, J., & Pound, N. (2017). Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men? Evolution & Human Behavior, 38(5), 626-634. 

Kteily, N. S., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Ho. A. K. (2017) Hierarchy in the eye of the beholder:  (Anti-)Egalitarianism shapes perceived levels of social inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(1), 136-159.

Sidanius, J., Cotterill, S., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Kteily, N., & Carvacho, H. (2016). Social dominance theory: Explorations in the psychology of oppression. Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice.

Bratt, C., Sidanius, J., & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2016). Shaping the development of prejudice: A latent growth curve analysis of the influence of social dominance orientation on outgroup affect in youth. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin.

Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Pratto, F., Henkel, K. E., Foels, R., & Stewart, A. L. (2015) The nature of social dominance orientation: Theorizing and measuring preferences for intergroup inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(6), 1003-1028.

Kteily, N.S., Cotterill, S., Sidanius, J., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Bergh, R. (2014) “Not one of us”: Predictors and consequences of denying ingroup characteristics to ambiguous targets. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(10), 1-17.

Examining the psychology of power ACROSS INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, AND SOCIETIES

Another stream of research centres on the study of the psychology of power as it plays out in the wider societal context. With former PhD student Sandra Obradovic (currently Open University), I have studied this in terms of identification by low power group members with superordinate groups, and we are currently focused on applying the lens of power and groups to understand the psychological appeal of populism (in collaboration with Seamus Power at University of Copenhagen).

My PhD dissertation research constituted the first experimental evidence for the phenomenon of vicarious power, as manifested in its primary psychological indicator: elevated approach orientation. In six studies, I demonstrated that implicit or explicit exposure to a shared member of a salient social group gaining power leads to an increase in approach orientation in the observer: greater focus on one’s goals, and preference for taking risks in order to achieve them. These effects were strongest among those who most strongly identified with their social group, and went away when the character observed was uncommitted to the group, or was a member of an outgroup. Vicarious power may be rooted in cognitive mechanisms evolved to detect social coalitions, and it likely has motivational effects on those observing group-based patterns of election and promotion to positions of power in society. 

RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS

Obradovic, S., Power, S., & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2020). The psychological appeal of populism. Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 125-131.

Obradovic, S., & Sheehy-Skeffington, J. (2020). Power, identity, and belonging: A mixed methods study of the processes shaping perceptions of EU integration in a prospective member state. European Journal of Social Psychology. 50 (7), 1425-1442.

Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Sidanius, J. (2013). Power on my side: A coalitional psychology approach to the vicarious experience of power. Paper presented at the 25th Annual Human Behavior & Evolution Society Conference, Miami, FL. 

Sheehy-Skeffington, J., & Sidanius, J. (2013). Approach orientation tracks the power positions of share group members. Paper presented at the Datablitz of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, New Orleans, LA.