Olaf Borghi, MSc
I am a doctoral candidate in the Marie-Curie network “Interdisciplinary Perspectives of the Politics of Adolescence & Democracy” based at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings (Royal Holloway, University of London).
In my PhD, I investigate how political beliefs and attitudes develop, and the cognitive and emotional factors underlying this development. The developmental focus of my research works in two ways. First, I focus on adolescence and young adulthood – times of cognitive, emotional, and political change. Second, I study processes of belief development, examining how people incorporate new information based on their existing political stances, and different biases that affect political belief formation and updating. I also have a research focus on how young people feel about and imagine their future in times of multiple crises, and how this relates to their political views.
If you are interested about my work, would like to chat or collaborate, contact me!
Recent News
Nov 2025 Our most recent paper, “Mind over bias: How is cognitive control related to politically motivated reasoning?”, has just been published in Cognition!
You can read more here: Borghi et al. (2026)
Oct 2025 The first paper of my PhD, “Facing a dark future: Young people’s future anxiety and political attitudes in the UK and Greece” has been published in a special issue on the Psychology of Pushback in Advances.in/Psychology.
You can read more here: Borghi et al. (2025)
Methodological interests and open science
My work has a strong methodological and interdisciplinary focus. I combine quantitative methods and tools from across the social, developmental, and cognitive sciences, including cognitive tasks, survey experiments, text analysis, and cognitive modelling. I also place a strong emphasis on open science, and commit to openly sharing data and materials for all my papers.