ERC is Europe’s most prestigious research grant, supporting excellent researchers in carrying out ground-breaking, ambitious, frontier research projects.
Professor Mike Quayle of University of Limerick’s Department of Psychology has been awarded almost €2m in ERC funding to investigate social polarisation. Professor Quayle, who is also a Funded Investigator with Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software based at UL, has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant for the project ID-COMPRESSION.
The project seeks to make a fundamental breakthrough in social identity, social information, and social polarisation and will fund an interdisciplinary team of experts in psychology and maths, including several postdocs and fully funded PhD studentships, over five years.
The award was one of only seven ERC grants in Ireland in 2023 and one of just two awarded in the social sciences and humanities domain.
The project builds on work already done under an ERC Starting Grant, Professor Quayle explained:
“Yes, my previous ERC grant developed a network theory of attitudes – this took the basic idea that, when two people share very similar attitudes, they are joined by a thread of affinity. We used network models to show how social groups have many threads of agreement internally; but there are much fewer threads running between groups. This allowed us to develop methods for visualising how social groups coordinate their opinions, and to develop models of how opinions might spread within and between groups. The new grant builds on that foundation, to model how people’s attitudes collectively form an information space that encodes social identity.”
Asked about the potential impact of his research, Professor Quayle explained: “The ERC explicitly funds high risk research that, if successful, will have high rewards. This means that there is a realistic possibility that our hypotheses are not supported by evidence – but we have licence and resources to explore new ground, and that’s an important part of the scientific process. We might make profound discoveries or find that our existing assumptions are wrong”.
“However, if our experimental and analytic work supports our theory, then we will have a much clearer understanding of how polarisation occurs and what functions it achieves. We will have some good ideas of how social media might amplify and accelerate polarisation, and some ideas for how we might build more cohesion into social systems. Care is needed however, since polarisation might sometimes be a good thing. Functioning democracies need parties with clear values and identities. We hope that this model will help us understand the difference between functional and pernicious polarisation. This research is radically interdisciplinary. Our team currently consists of social psychologists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, and computer scientists. I am excited by the possibilities that this kind of collaboration opens up. This new grant gives us a firm foundation to position the UL Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at the forefront of computational methods in social and behavioural science,” Professor Quayle added.
WATCH Professor Quayle speak about his approach to research and how he strives for excellence with ERC funding:
