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 change their minds based on new information, 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 support for democracy and ideological views, including gender divides on political issues.
If you are interested about my work, would like to chat or collaborate, contact me!
Recent News
My research was featured in Bridging Divides, a new initiative and podcast series from the British Red Cross. As guest in Episode 2, I had the chance to talk about belief updating in politics and beyond. Bridging Divides: Can we really change people's minds?
Our paper "Mind over bias: How is cognitive control related to politically motivated reasoning?" has been published in Cognition. Borghi et al. (2026)
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. 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.