UL researcher awarded €2 million in research funding

A RESEARCHER at University of Limerick has been awarded almost €2 million in European Research Council funding to investigate social polarisation.

Professor Mike Quayle of UL’s Department of Psychology and a Funded Investigator with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software based at UL, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project ID-COMPRESSION.

The project seeks to make a fundamental breakthrough in social identity, social information, and social polarisation, defined as the splitting of society into groups based on class, gender, sexuality etc.

The ERC grant will fund an interdisciplinary team of experts in psychology and maths, including several postdocs and fully funded PhD studentships, over five years.

This award is one of only seven ERC grants in Ireland in 2023 and one of just two awarded in the social sciences and humanities domain.

"We urgently need to understand social polarisation to tackle pressing issues like climate change, and in planning how to respond to future events like pandemics," Professor Quayle explained.

"This is especially important since technological advances like social media and AI seem to be accelerating and amplifying polarisation in ways we do not understand well.

"Since we tend to trust people much like ourselves, we are more likely to be persuaded by people who differ in a few small respects than by people with radically different perspectives. By aligning with people we already feel affinity to, and by feeling affinity with those we agree with, we create tribes of like-minded others and collectively create social information that encodes our social identities," he continued.

"How do we build cohesive societies and simultaneously reach consensus on how to deal with contentious issues? If successful, this project will deliver a model of polarisation that will help us tackle this question."