Fully funded 4-year PhD studentship to join the ERC-funded IDENTITY-ERROR project: Social Psychology with an interest in social identity and/or emotions.

About the Project

The Identity-Error project aims to produce a new understanding of vulnerability to mistruth and conspiracy theories that integrates social, cognitive, and emotional levels of analysis. This will involve an interdisciplinary team developing an integrative methodological framework that scales individual models of cognition to a social level. Building on a social identity approach to belief formation, we will be using a combination of experimental and computational methods to understand the social functions of endorsing highly implausible beliefs.

The Tasks:

You will lead the design, implementation and write-up of a series of studies investigating the social and emotional factors that influence vulnerability to misinformation. In particular, you will investigate how identity and affect change the way people update beliefs when presented with evidence.

The Team

You will become part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers with members from psychology, applied mathematics, statistics, political science, and other areas.

The Candidate

We are looking for a curious and self-motivated candidate who is open to learning new skills and working with an interdisciplinary team.

Essential:

• You must meet the requirements for a PhD at the University of Limerick (i.e. BA/BSc in relevant discipline).
• You should have good to excellent performance in a prior degree relevant to the project.

Desirable:

• A master’s degree in a relevant discipline.
• Ability to work well as part of an interdisciplinary team.
• Knowledge of the social identity approach and/or the role of emotions in decision making; knowledge and competence in open science methods.

How to apply:

Apply by email to paul.maher@ul.ie with the subject line “Identity Error Studentships”. Include as attachments: A single PDF comprising a motivation letter specifying which studentship you are applying for and a 1-2 page CV; A PDF sample of written work.

The preferred starting date is September 1st 2026. Deadline for certain consideration is 5th June 2026.