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Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, specializing in political psychology, extremism, artificial intelligence, public opinion, racial and ethnic politics, quantitative methods, and computational social science. My research relies on various methods, using lab experiments, quasi-experiments, survey experiments, text-as-data, surveys, artificial intelligence, and large-language models.

My research focuses on how democratic societies should respond to extremism, using approaches from political psychology and generative AI tools. These are deeply integrated in my work—political psychology informs my use of AI, and AI tools test theories from political psychology. More specifically, my work explores what extremism is, who people blame for extremism, how political persuasion intersects with extremism, and what encourages and discourages extremism. Across this work, I consider extremism in the public and at the elite level. I examine both a general approach to extremism and several specific kinds – including racial extremism, partisan extremism, and populism.

Across my research, I find that extremism is more likely when elites encourage dispositional blame, people experience threatening kinds of intergroup contact, and people see their opponents in identity-based ways. In contrast, extremism is reduced when individuals view opponents in more instrumental terms, when elites emphasize more impersonal forms of blame, and when citizens are encouraged to listen to (but not necessarily agree with) their opponents more. I consider how elites encourage and respond to racial extremism, how the public and elites perceive of extremism, and the way elites and the public react to extremist perspectives. I also consider the ways that artificial intelligence language models unveil the bias and extremism found in the public at large, offer ways to scale up depolarization and conflict-resolution strategies, and serve as powerful tools for studying theoretically complex ideas in the social science (like persuasion and extremism).

You can see more details about my research projects on the research page of my website. You can access my full CV here.

I teach courses at BYU on American politics, public opinion, statistical methods, and extremism. In my teaching, I use a variety of active learning strategies and different kinds of assessments (papers, oral exams, and group work) to help my students develop skills that they take with them as they leave my classes. More information on my teaching can be found on the teaching page of my website.