Michael Quayle

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Limerick

This study investigates the emergence of collective identity among individuals critical of vaccination policies in France during the COVID-19 pandemic. As concerns grew over mandated health measures, a loose collective formed on Twitter to assert autonomy over vaccination decisions. Using analyses of pronoun usage, outgroup labeling, and tweet simi...

Social bots, employed to manipulate public opinion, pose a novel threat to digital societies. Existing bot research has emphasized technological aspects while neglecting psychological factors shaping human–bot interactions. This research addresses this gap within the context of the US‐American electorate. Two datasets provide evidence that partisan...

Research has found that psychological groups based on opinion congruence are an important group type. Previous research constructed such groups around opinions potentially connected to pre‐existing identities. We strip away the socio‐structural context by using novel opinions to determine whether opinion congruence alone can be a category cue which...

Belief network analysis (BNA) refers to a class of methods designed to detect and outline structural organizations of complex attitude systems. BNA can be used to analyze attitude-structures of abstract concepts such as ideologies, worldviews, and norm systems that inform how people perceive and navigate the world. The present manuscript presents a...

We assess the strategic alignment of attitudes and the active construction of attitude-based identity across two studies. Study one assessed the twitter response (hashtags in English) to the war in Ukraine for five months after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine 2022 ( N = 8149). Results demonstrated that individuals publicly expressed hashtags sim...

This paper explores how individuals’ language use in gender-specific groups (“mothers” and “fathers”) compares to their interactions when referred to as “parents.” Language adaptation based on the audience is well-documented, yet large-scale studies of naturally-occurring audience effects are rare. To address this, we investigate audience and gende...

The social identity approach asserts that self‐categorization is fluid and created anew in context. Despite this, research often conceptualizes identities as being based on static categories. In this article, we assess: how attitudes may be relevant attributes used to categorize the self and others, and therefore have the potential to foster social...

We apply a newly developed attitude network‐modelling technique (Response‐Item Network, or ResIN) to study attitude–identity relationships in the context of hot–button issues that polarize the current US‐American electorate. The properties of the network–method allow us to simultaneously depict differences in the structural organization of attitude...

Social bots that aim to distort public opinion represent a novel threat to digitalized societies. Current bot research has largely prioritized technological issues and left out psychological factors related to ordinary online users. The present research addresses this gap and adds to a growing literature that emphasizes the role of partisan-based m...

Polarization is a key phenomenon which has been linked to increasing disliking between people of opposite political groups. Furthermore, polarization can extend to new topics such as the debate on COVID-19 vaccines, making it more complex to coordinate efforts for such a problem. The social identity approach (SIA) offers a robust theoretical framew...

We consider the analysis of temporal data arising from online interactive social experiments, which is complicated by the fact that classical independence assumptions about the observations are not satisfied. Therefore, we propose an approach that compares the output of a fitted (linear) model from the observed interaction data to that generated by...

Human beings adapt their language to the audience they interact with. While audience effects have been studied theoretically and in small-scale research designs, large-scale studies of naturally-occurring audience effects are rare. We look at the audience effects in interaction with gendered contexts emphasizing different social identities (i.e., m...

Agent-based models (ABMs) often rely on psychometric constructs such as ‘opinions’, ‘stubbornness’, ‘happiness’, etc. The measurement process for these constructs is quite different from the one used in physics as there is no standardized unit of measurement for opinion or happiness. Consequently, measurements are usually affected by ‘psychometric...

Computer mediated communication has marked differences from the face-to-face context. One major difference is that, in the online context, we often have explicit access to others' opinions and these opinions are often the only informational cues available. We investigate if awareness of opinion congruence, in the absence of any other reference cate...

Opinion dynamics models have an enormous potential for studying current phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy or diffusion of fake news. Unfortunately, to date, most of the models have little to no empirical validation. One major problem in testing these models against real-world data relates to the difficulties in measuring opinions in ways that map...

Social media has become a major platform for information-exchange, discourse, and protest and has been linked to a wide range of pressing macro developments. Consequenlty, there is significant interest from scholars as well as from the wider publuc to understand how social media affordances interact with human behavior. In attempts to address these...

Vaccines save millions of lives every year. They are recommended by experts, trusted by the majority of people, and promoted by expensive health campaigns. Even so, people with neutral attitudes are more persuaded by people holding anti-vaccine than pro-vaccine attitudes. Our analysis of vaccine-related attitudes in more than 140 countries makes se...

While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life, serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit to explore audience effects and gender stereotypes. It suggests a novel method to study topical variation in individuals' language...

Authoritarianism emerges in times of societal threat, in part driven by desires for group-based security. As such, we propose that the threat caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with increased authoritarian tendencies and that this can be partially explained by increased national identification. We tested this hypothesis by collecting cr...

We use a network‐based method to explore bifurcation in the multidimensional opinion‐based political identity structure from 2012 to 2020 in American National Election Studies data. We define polarization as ideological clustering which occurs when attitudes are linked or aligned across group‐relevant dimensions. We identify relevant dimensions wit...

Belief network analysis (BNA) is a new class of methods with strong potential to research the organization and development of abstract meaning systems. By mapping the attitude system, this method provides a more profound understanding of often “fuzzy” concepts such as ideologies, worldviews, and norm systems. BNA therefore holds potential implicati...

The way measurements are defined in the social sciences has a deep impact on modelling, especially on agent-based modelling. In this presentation we show how different measurements of the same construct (e.g. happiness or opinion) can completely alter the measured dynamics (and so the phenomenon to model).

The effectiveness of measures introduced to minimise the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19) depends on compliance from all members of society. The Irish response to COVID-19 has been framed as a collective effort, fostering national solidarity. However, dominant representations of the national communi...

We use a new method based on both network and item response theory to link attitudes to identity. Specifically, we show how our method is able to identify that the American democrats tend to be identified by strongly agreement on some items. While all the other item responses (from weakly agree to strongly disagree) are more related to the republic...

Opinion dynamics models have an enormous potential for studying current phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy. Unfortunately, to date, most of the models have little to no empirical validation. One major problem in testing these models against real-world data relates to the difficulties in measuring opinions in ways that map directly to representatio...

Personal social networks reveal potential sources of dyadic social influence. Social influence is picked up as a main principle of Axelrod’s model of cultural dissemination. Even though social influence is performed via social networks, the model is generally just run on a regular lattice instead of more complex network topologies. In this paper, w...

Network visualisation, drawn from attitudinal survey data, exposes the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine social-identity-based polarisation.Our goal is to present a method for revealing polarisation in attitudinal surveys....

This article explores how the populist radical right manage identity talk on an international stage. Speeches from the Europe of Nations and Freedom conference held in Koblenz, Germany, on January 21, 2017, were analyzed using a rhetorical and critical discursive psychology approach. This occasion was a celebratory public display of international s...

Networks, representing attitudinal survey data, expose the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine social-identity-based groups. Our goal is to present a method for revealing polarization and opinion-based groups in attitudinal...

When the interactions of agents on a network are assumed to follow the Deffuant opinion dynamics model, the outcomes are known to depend on the structure of the underlying network. This behavior cannot be captured by existing mean-field approximations for the Deffuant model. In this paper, a generalized mean-field approximation is derived that acco...

A survey can be represented by a bipartite network as it has two types of nodes, participants and items in which participants can only interact with items. We introduce an agreement threshold to take a minimal projection of the participants linked by shared responses in order to identify opinion-based groups. We show that in American National Elect...

Opinion dynamics models have been developed to study and predict the evolution of public opinion. Intensive research has been carried out on these models, especially exploring the different rules and topologies, which can be considered two degrees of freedom of these models. In this paper we introduce what can be considered a third degree of freedo...

When the interactions of agents on a network are assumed to follow the Deffuant opinion dynamics model, the outcomes are known to depend on the structure of the underlying network. This behavior cannot be captured by existing mean-field approximations for the Deffuant model. In this paper, a generalised mean-field approximation is derived that acco...

Partisan patterns of compliance with public health measures are a feature of early COVID‐19 responses. In many cases, these differences in behaviour relate to pre‐existing group identities. However, in times of rapid societal change, novel opinion‐based groups can emerge and provide a new basis for partisan identification and divergent collective b...

Shared opinions are an important feature in the formation of social groups. In this paper, we use the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination to represent opinion-based groups. In the Axelrod model, each agent has a set of features which each holds one of a set of nominally related traits. Survey data has a similar structure, where each participant...

In this paper I propose a network theory of attitudes where attitude agreements and disagreements forge a multilayer network structure that simultaneously binds people into groups (via attitudes) and attitudes into clusters (via people who share them). This theory proposes that people have a range of possible attitudes (like cards in a hand) but th...

Internationalization is a key aim of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). This article uses bibliometric techniques to explore international collaborations in the Society’s core activities, namely the journal Political Psychology and annual meetings. We explore how authors from different regions of the world are interconnected...

This paper addresses the formation of social norms of cooperation through interaction in repeated Public Goods Games, using novel multilevel techniques. Cooperation has traditionally been understood as the interplay of static factors such as shared social identity and pre-existing norms. This study investigates the dynamic emergence of cooperative...

Analysis of temporal network data arising from online interactive social experiments is not possible with standard statistical methods because the assumptions of these models, such as independence of observations, are not satisfied. In this paper, we outline a modelling methodology for such experiments where, as an example, we analyse data collecte...

We examined how men tell stories of masculinity, continuity, and change in the liminal context of moving between hometown and university. In nine in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with male students at an Irish university, participants were asked to describe their experiences moving between the places of home and university. We examined the funct...

This paper compares the position and performance of Africans in international research networks, comparing a well-funded and internationally driven research network against a network developing organically with less funding and oversight. Specifically, we map the co-authorship networks related to African governance and public policy (1) in general...

The present study explores women’s ideals for masculinity in different social contexts (work, family/romance, and friendship) and compares how traditional (agentic) and non-patriarchal (communal) masculinity are valued in each context. Survey data were collected from one international (N = 159) and three South African samples (Ns = 86, 100, 161) of...

This paper explores the way in which announcers created spectacle in the Eurosport coverage of the men’s and women’s tennis singles semi-finals and finals at the Australian Open 2015. This was an event where gender representations were under global social media scrutiny after two female players were asked to ‘twirl’ for the audience. We used a two-...

This article explores how people do sympathetic talk in relation to the European 'refugee crisis.' The analysis was grounded in critical discursive psychology and also drew on the concept of affective-discursive practice. Data was retrieved from a phone-in program on Irish national radio over a six-month period when the 'refugee crisis' debate was...

We investigated the effect of structural interdependencies between groups (especially inequality), and interdependencies between individuals on ingroup favoritism in minimal group situations. Previous research has attempted to determine whether ingroup favoritism is produced by categorization or intragroup interdependencies (reciprocation expectati...

Data dictionary 2013 and 2014 data files. (XLSX)

Vpldata2013wider-201697.Rdata. (CSV)

Vpldata2014revwider-2016104.Rdata. (CSV)

This article develops an identity performance model of prejudice that highlights the creative influence of prejudice expressions on norms and situations. Definitions of prejudice can promote social change or stability when they are used to achieve social identification, explanation, and mobilization. Tacit or explicit agreement about the nature of...

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has been used in gender studies since the early-1980s to explain men’s power over women. Stressing the legitimating power of consent (rather than crude physical or political power to ensure submission), it has been used to explain men’s health behaviours and the use of violence. Gender activists and others seeki...

Racial segregation encourages members of historically advantaged groups to form negative intergroup attitudes, which then motivate practices of discrimination that sustain inequality and disadvantage. By implication, interventions designed to increase intergroup contact have been proposed as a means of reducing dominant group prejudices and promoti...

Patterns of collaboration in social psychology from 2000 to 2010 were mapped to analyse the position of African authors in the international co-authorship network using bibliographic records from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. There are very few social psychologists working in Africa, with the majority of these located in South Africa. Indee...

Background South Africa is a major hub of HIV prevention trials, with plans for a licensure trial to start in 2015. The appropriate standards of care and of prevention in HIV vaccine trials are complex and debated issues and ethical guidelines offer some direction. However, there has been limited empirical exploration of South African stakeholders’...

The experience of food insecurity in the South African university student population is not well documented or researched. Data to assess vulnerability to food insecurity in a sample of 1.083 students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg Campus) was collected between 2007 and 2010 via a questionnaire developed specifically for thi...

It has been internationally accepted that informed consent is a fundamental ethical requirement for all clinical research trials, including HIV vaccine trials (HIVVTs). However, research has shown that prospective trial participants often demonstrate a lack of understanding of concepts conveyed to them during the informed consent process. This may...

This article explores the production of post-apartheid Afrikaner identity in South Africa. Centred around the private sphere of the braai, the article draws on discursive psychology to investigate the participants' dilemmas and struggles over their identity as Afrikaners, South Africans, and Africans, and the ways in which these identities are bein...

Classic models of attribution are increasingly used, despite serious problems with their empirical validation. This study revisits Kelley's (1967) ANOVA model of attribution and argues that it will most usefully predict attributions when attributional processes are socially “safe” and have few social consequences. The results demonstrate that attri...

Contact theory holds that increased contact between members of different groups can improve intergroup attitudes and reduce prejudice if it meets certain quality criteria, such as equal status, common goals, and cooperation within the contact situation. It is now emerging that even extended contact, or the mere knowledge that an ingroup member has...

Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self-interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national tele...

Masculinity is often studied as produced and enacted by men, unintentionally positioning women as mere consumers of masculinity, rather than active agents in its construction. This study explored five young South African women’s constructions of masculinity in the contexts of work, friendships, family, and romantic relationships and the contextual...

A Random Digit Dialing survey (n = 794) examined the interracial contact experiences and racial attitudes of White South Africans. The survey measured racial attitudes not only in terms of individuals' prejudice, but also in terms of their perceptions of group threat, perceived injustice, and support for various government policies designed to rect...

In the early stages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it was primarily men who were infected with HIV, but that trend has now reversed (WHO, 2003). In many countries the infection rates for young women are five times higher than young men (RHO Archives, 2005), and young women are generally infected at an earlier age than young men (Walsh cited in RHO Archi...

There is little published literature on the ethical concerns of stakeholders in HIV vaccine trials. This study explored the ethical challenges identified by various stakeholders, through an open‐ended, in‐depth approach. While the few previous studies have been largely quantitative, respondents in this study had the opportunity to spontaneously ide...

This study uses transcripts of interactions recorded between computer technicians and users to investigate the activities related to attribution and problem solving in the context of institutional computer support. We explore how achieving consensual attributions (in the context of diagnosis) is integral to managing moment-to-moment social demands,...

Universities in South Africa face the challenge of redressing past (and continuing) inequalities in higher education by increasing accessibility to previously (and currently) disadvantaged students. One means of doing so is through 'access' or 'bridging' programmes. This article explores successful students' perceptions of one such programme at the...

This study forms part of the preparation of communities for HIV-preventive vaccine trials in South Africa. On the basis of the assumption that attitudes to any HIV vaccine or vaccine trials will partly be influenced by experiences of vaccination in general, this study aimed to investigate knowledge of, attitudes to, and experiences of vaccination i...

Informed consent and understanding are essential ethical requirements for clinical trial participation. Traditional binary measures of understanding may be limited and not be the best measures of level of understanding. This study designed and compared 4 measures of understanding for potential participants being prepared for enrollment in South Afr...

This paper explores computer failure as a social event by examining recorded interactions between computer users and help-desk consultants (technicians). It was found, first, that the nature of a failure was negotiated between participants rather than being simply technically evident. Failure was defined from users' perspectives, in relation to wha...

In 1999 the South African media was the subject of a South African Human Rights Commission inquiry into racism. This article explores the discursive practices deployed by mainstream newspapers in response to these accusations of racism. It shows how several interlocking strategies of denial were used to remodel the field of racist practices and rep...