Sze Yuh Nina Wang

Sze Yuh Nina Wang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cornell University in the Department of Psychology. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto. Their research interests include using computational and experimental methods to understand misinformation and political polarization, especially in the online contexts.

The project

Title: Understanding the role of moralization in political polarization

Political partisanship and polarization are increasing in many political contexts (e.g., Finkel et al.,2020), with strikingly high levels of political animosity and negative emotions such as fear and anger towards ideological opponents. Moralization is one process that may exacerbate and fuel partisan divides (Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005). While moralization and moral communities can have positive effects like motivating political action (Skitka & Bauman, 2008), fostering community, and building trust, moralization can also amp up partisan hostility and reduce willingness to compromise. In this project, I investigate the factors that motivate moralization and its resulting downstream consequences in political contexts, with a focus on how it fuels (and can perhaps mend) political divides. I leverage techniques from computational social science in combination with more traditional social psychology methods to answer these questions.

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Wang, S.Y.N., Côté, É., Inbar, Y. (under review). The Effect of Politicians’ Moral Rhetoric on Affective Polarization and Political Engagement. Nature Human Behaviour.
• Rao, A., Guo, S., Wang, S.Y.N., Morstatter, F., & Lerman, K. (in press). Pandemic Culture Wars: Partisan Differences in the Moral Language of COVID-19 Discussions. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Big Data Analytics.
• Wang, S.Y.N. & Inbar, Y. (2022). Re-Examining the Diffusion of Moralized Rhetoric from Political Elites: Effects of Valence and Ideology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
• Wang, S.Y.N. & Inbar, Y. (2022). The moral rhetoric of political representatives. In Dehghani, M. & Boyd, R.L. (Eds). The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology.
• Wang, S.Y.N. & Inbar, Y. (2021). Partisan differences in moral language use by U.S. political elites. Psychological Science, 32(1), 14-26.