taken from PDF attached below Studentship 1: Social Sciences with an Interest in Social Identity Studentship 2: Applied Maths/Stats/Computational Social Science
Background. We are living in an era particularly characterized by “culture wars,” where attitudes on important topics (like climate change, vaccination, etc.) are bound into political identities. These processes have profound implications for issues that require strong collective coordination, like health behaviour, environmental policies, and politics. For example, coordinating attitudes will be fundamental to addressing climate change.
The project. The ERC-funded ID-COMPRESSION project explores the idea that issue-based polarization is information compressibility, where attitudes provide redundant (i.e. compressible) information about groups and identity. This framework conceptualizes people holding attitudes as a social information system where people are located by their own attitudes and can easily locate each-other in the social system from a few expressed attitudes. The more compressible the social information system, the fewer bits of information are required to locate people within it. These ideas flow from the social identity and social representations approaches to attitudes (for theoretical background, see Quayle (In Press) and Quayle and Durrheim (2025), referenced below. We are particularly excited to explore conversion pathways where, we hypothesize, people’s willingness to adopt an idea will depend on their current location in the social information system. The PhD candidates will work as part of this team testing these ideas with secondary data, social experiments and simulations. We will particularly explore whether and how information becomes compressible when it is passed through simple social networks, whether social information compression maps to polarization (e.g. that people compress social information more in highly polarized contexts), and will experimentally test the concept of conversion pathways. We will work with applied mathematicians in our group to develop metrics and methods for estimating compressibility, and for mapping it to other measures of polarization.
The team. Our group values kindness and curiosity. We are a loose collective with members from psychology, applied mathematics, statistics, political science, physics and others. Please take a look at recent publications to see the type of work we do.
What are we offering? We are offering two funded PhD studentships (up to 4 years) to join the ERC-funded ID-Compression project, one leading to a PhD in Psychology and the other in Applied Maths/Statistics. (The value of the award will roughly match the Research Ireland PhD fellowship stipend and local/EU fees). There will be additional funding for research, conference travel, training and skill development. Note that while we will consider global applications, international fees are not covered.
What type of applicants are we looking for? We do NOT expect every candidate to already have all these skills. In fact, the perfect person for these positions will probably underestimate their abilities and realize they have a lot to learn. The most important qualities are a willingness to engage with new concepts, diligently chip away at complex tasks, and persevere through confusion! With that in mind, these are the essential and desirable qualities: Essential: • You must meet the requirements for a PhD at the University of Limerick. • You should have good to excellent performance in a prior degree relevant to the project, as described above. Desirable: • Experience of using quantitative methods and knowledge of, or interest in, computational social science methods. • Willing and able to extend your skills and knowledge across disciplines. • Able to work well with others. • Knowledge of the social identity and/or social representations traditions or closely related approaches; knowledge and competence in open science methods (especially for studentship 1). • Knowledge of network science and/or information theory (especially for studentship 2).
How to apply: Apply by email to [email protected] with the subject line “PhD Studentship Application” Include as attachments: • A single PDF comprising a motivation letter and brief CV specifying which studentship you are applying for and showing how you meet the essential and desirable requirements (at least partially). Explain why you are interested in the project, how it maps to your training, skills and experience (< 4 pages in total). • A PDF sample of written work, such as a dissertation, research project, preprint or publication.
Timeline and procedure: The preferred starting date is the PhD intake at the start of September, but this could be deferred for one semester (to January 2026). • Deadline for certain consideration is 10th July 2025. We may continue to consider applications after this date if the positions are not yet filled. • Shortlisted candidates will be invited to interview. • If offered the studentship, candidates will need to apply and be accepted to the UL Structured PhD programme via the usual channels without prejudice. We appreciate how much effort it takes to apply and thank candidates in advance.
Useful background to our approach: Quayle, M. (In Press). Social Identity Networks: People Holding Attitudes Are a Collective Social Identity Information System and Bipartite Networks Are a Useful way to Represent Them. European Review of Social Psychology. Available: https://michaelquayle.net/pubs/Quayle2025_Social-IdentityNetworks_AcceptedVersion.pdf
Durrheim, K., & Quayle, M. (2025). Human murmuration: Group polarisation as compression in interactionlanguage dynamics captured by large language models. European Review of Social Psychology, 1– 40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2025.2499332 (Open access)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/jobs/653