Rate My Professor David Young

David Young is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He earned a PhD and an MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Psychology from University College London. His academic work centers on political psychology, where he applies cognitive science methods, including computational modelling, experiments, and large-scale survey analysis, to examine topics such as belief polarization, perceptions of media independence, affective polarization within parties, and issue polarization. Key publications include the 2025 paper 'Belief Polarization Can Be Caused by Disagreements Over Source Independence: Computational Modelling, Experimental Evidence, and Applicability to Real-World Politics' in Cognition, 'The Bias-and-Expertise Model: A Bayesian Network Model of Political Source Characteristics' in Cognitive Science (2025), 'Affective polarization within parties' in Political Psychology (2024), and 'An authoritarianism-compatible text changes British attitudes towards EU immigration' in Scientific Reports (2025). He leads research on the MHP Polarisation Tracker, a bi-annual UK survey on polarization funded by MHP Group and the Cambridge Political Psychology Lab. In 2025, he received the Anne Treisman Prize from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge for the best postdoctoral paper. He previously received the Plotkin Prize from University College London in 2019 for the best undergraduate dissertation. Young has experience teaching courses in judgment and decision making, statistics, and programming in R, and maintains a commitment to open science practices.

His postdoctoral research at Birkbeck College, University of London, investigates threats to deliberation in digital democracy platforms, and he collaborates on projects funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Young contributes to the Cambridge Political Psychology Lab and has authored blog posts on topics including factional polarization and demographic trends in the UK.