Member Spotlight: Flavio Azevedo on the Search for a Globally Representative Science

Flavio Azevedo is a social psychologist and assistant professor of interdisciplinary social sciences at Utrecht University, with a focus on youth studies, where he researches the political psychology of ideological attitudes and integrating open science into higher education. Azevedo was named an APS Rising Star in 2025.

What led to your scientific interest in the role of ideology and identity in justifying social and economic injustices?

My interest began with a basic yet unsettling question I could never quite ignore: Why do some people believe that a nation, group, race, gender, or even species is justified in dominating, controlling, or exploiting another? Why is it psychologically acceptable for some to view inequalities as natural, deserved, or even necessary? That puzzle—why individuals endorse, rationalize, reproduce, and even impose power and hierarchy over one another—became the foundation of my research agenda. Much of my work examines how ideological commitments and identity processes make social and economic disparities appear legitimate, inevitable, justified, or morally right. This includes studying the psychology of conservatism as it relates to endorsement of inequality, resistance to change, and support for maintaining existing gaps in wealth, rights, and opportunity.

A second origin point is personal. I grew up in one of the lowest socioeconomic strata in Brazil. My family had limited formal education and a history of family violence, and I ended up leaving home early. I often say that I survived my life rather than lived it until only recently, when I secured a permanent contract at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Much of that sense of survival came from the constant attrition of moving upward through social class strata—each step bringing unfamiliar norms, expectations, and codes that needed to be learned quickly and often alone.

Moving through these environments, across social classes, institutions, and countries, made certain features of social life unavoidably visible to me. Power, privilege, and hierarchy were not abstractions but everyday structures I had to navigate, decode, and adapt to. These transitions became, in a way, a lived laboratory for understanding how systems shape people and how people, in turn, come to justify the systems they inhabit. They also clarified that inequality is structured, patterned, and reproduced. And that people’s attitudes toward systems are deeply shaped by the position they occupy within them.

This life experience made it impossible to think about psychology without thinking about institutions, resource distributions, and the wider architectures that shape human perceptions, beliefs, and behavior.

What are some highlights of your research? What has it shown?

My research focuses on the psychology of political attitudes and behavior. Across multiple projects, I consistently find that psychological constructs, such as social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), collective narcissism, and system justification, are strong and reliable predictors of political attitudes and behavior (Azevedo, 2023). This finding may sound intuitive to psychologists, but it remains underappreciated in much of political science and sociology, where psychological variables are often treated as secondary or are only sparsely measured in large surveys like the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). Coming from a political science background, I was initially surprised by how much explanatory power these psychological dispositions retain once they are measured carefully and modeled appropriately (Azevedo et al., 2017; Azevedo & Jost, 2021).

A second, and related, finding concerns whether or not ordinary citizens meaningfully form attitudes and behave in ideological terms at all. Much of the classic literature—most notably Converse’s 1964 work and, more recently, Kinder and Kalmoe’s 2017 work—suggests that ordinary citizens lack a coherent ideological belief system, and even within social psychology, ideology has often been treated as symbolic rather than operational, with limited force beyond specific niche domains. Yet across my work, I repeatedly find that ideology itself matters, often substantially so (Azevedo et al., 2019; Azevedo et al., 2022). When studies are well designed, use valid measures, and allow sufficient analytic flexibility, ideological orientations predict political attitudes and behavior robustly and in many cases as strongly as, or more strongly than, partisanship or group-based identities (Azevedo & Jost, 2021).

What is perhaps most striking is that these results emerged despite my initial expectations. When I began this line of research, I assumed my primary task would be to reproduce what the literature already claimed. Instead, I repeatedly failed to recover those expected patterns. Funnily enough, I also had a personal beef with the measures used in political psychology such as SDO, RWA, and other classic constructs, but data proved me wrong on their value. This discrepancy pushed me to think more critically about publication incentives, field and analytic conventions, and the selective visibility of findings in the literature. These concerns ultimately led me toward open science and metascientific work.

Read Open Science 2.0: Advancing Reform Via Diversity, Communities, Education, and Theory

That trajectory also shaped my involvement in founding the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT, which emerged from a shared concern that methodological reform should strengthen science without narrowing what counts as legitimate knowledge. Much of my research, therefore, sits at the intersection of political psychology and metascience: using rigorous, cumulative approaches to show that psychology and ideology matter, often more than we have been willing to acknowledge, and that how we do science fundamentally shapes what we believe to be true.

What new or expanded research are you planning to pursue?

Much of my current and future work builds directly on the findings I described earlier, particularly the evidence that ideology and psychological dispositions are more structured, stable, and consequential among ordinary citizens than is often assumed. One strand of this work uses large-scale datasets such as the ANES, GSS, Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and related surveys to examine ideological constraint and stability in the mass public. In parallel, I am working on comparative projects that explicitly contrast the stability and constraint of ideology with that of personality traits, asking whether ideology is in fact less coherent than other individual-difference constructs. Relatedly, I am developing longitudinal models of ideological development among youth, leveraging new waves of the Psychology of Political Behavior Studies (PPBS) data to study how ideology, identity, threat perceptions, and social environments coevolve during adolescence and early adulthood.

Read Azevedo and colleagues Global Spotlight column, Latin American Psychological Science: Will the Global North Make Room?

A central infrastructure for much of this work is PPBS. In 2026, PPBS will mark its tenth anniversary. Over the past decade, it has grown into a large, cross-national research program designed to address foundational questions in political psychology, including ideological asymmetries, system justification, polarization, and political behavior. We have recently secured funding to build a dedicated research infrastructure around PPBS, including reproducible online reports, transparent analytic pipelines, and standardized documentation that allow findings to be continuously updated and scrutinized. Crucially, PPBS is also being developed as an equity-oriented platform. Beyond advancing theory, the dataset is explicitly designed to support early-career researchers—particularly those from low- and middle-income countries and underrepresented contexts—who often lack access to large, high-quality political datasets. We are building a supervised proposal-based system in which researchers can apply to work with the data, receive theoretical and methodological support, and lead high-impact publications. This model aims to help internationalize political psychology by shifting the field away from its heavy reliance on U.S.-centric and Western approaches toward research that reflects the majority world more accurately.

Alongside this work, I continue to study contemporary political conflict and social movements. This includes ongoing projects on support for Black Lives Matter, using intersectional and cross-national approaches, as well as research on the psychological foundations of support for counter movements such as Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and White Lives Matter. These projects examine how ideology, identity, threat perceptions, and system-justifying beliefs shape divergent responses to shared political events.

I am also leading an effort toward cumulative synthesis via the development of a living review platform to help resolve persistent theoretical debates in political psychology using systematic, transparent, and continuously updated evidence. In parallel, together with colleagues, I work on improving how ideology itself is measured and compared across contexts, including a dedicated program on measuring latent ideological dimensions over time and across populations. Moreover, we research the psychological and political underpinnings of Christian nationalism in the United States, political and psychological sources of support for discourses of delay, shifts in the meaning of ideology across historical periods, a large cross-national study of the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and authoritarianism, and the interesting phenomena of performative progressivism in academia, where progressive norms are frequently signaled without corresponding changes to incentives, governance, or resource distribution.

Finally, a substantial part of my agenda lies in open science and metaresearch. Through FORRT I work with international and interdisciplinary colleagues on building global infrastructures for the democratization of science, research training (forrt.org/nexus), and epistemic equity (e.g., forrt.org/citation-politics). This includes continued involvement in replication initiatives, including the creation, curation, and expansion of the world’s largest replication database (forrt.org/replication-hub), and founding and co-editing the world’s first diamond journal devoted to replications and repetitive research from both quantitative and qualitative approaches (replicationresearch.org). Collective, these works have recently been recognized within the United Nation’s and UNESCO’s Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (forrt.org/awards), which is significant because it places issues of transparency, inclusion, and global participation at the level of international science policy. FORRT for World Development (FORWARD), is recognized as critical infrastructure for advancing Outcome 4 (widely and equitably practiced open science) and Outcome 1 (a globally science-literate society). For me, this recognition underscores that improving how science is conducted, and who gets to participate in it, is not peripheral to sustainable development goals but central to their fulfilment.

Together, these efforts reflect a broader goal: To advance political psychology theoretically while also building the infrastructure necessary for a more cumulative, inclusive, and globally representative science.

What is the biggest challenge you have encountered in your career?

The biggest challenge I have encountered is confronting the gap between how academia presents itself and how it often operates in practice. Academia is frequently described as progressive, inclusive, and justice-oriented. Yet academia is also one of the most traditional, hierarchical, and neoliberal institutions in the world. Much of what passes as progressivism is performative, focused on signaling values rather than transforming the structures, incentives, and power relations that actually shape academic life. This is not a moral concern: It is a structural one. Academic institutions are highly risk-averse, prestige-driven, and slow to change. These features can serve important epistemic functions, such as protecting against fads or low-quality research, but they also make it extremely difficult to address urgent societal problems, ranging from increases in negative public health outcomes to antiscientific movements, where delay in scientific proactiveness itself has had detrimental consequences for society at large.

Coming from the belief that academia would be a safe haven for marginalized scholars, immigrants, and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, it was challenging to realize how often existing structures reproduce exclusion rather than mitigate it. Understanding and navigating this tension—between the values academia professes and the systems it maintains—has been the most persistent challenge in my career.

What practical advice would you offer to an early-career researcher who wants to be in your position one day?

Much of my advice stems directly from the challenges I have encountered navigating academic structures that privilege individualism, prestige, and risk-aversion over cumulative, community-driven science.

First, study systems, not only individuals. Political psychology often gravitates toward individual traits and attitudes, but many of the most consequential patterns—inequality, polarization, distrust in science—are produced by institutions, historical arrangements, and media environments. Integrating structural analyses into psychological models leads to more durable and socially meaningful insights.

Second, prioritize transparency as a scientific and professional principle, not an administrative burden. Preregistration, open methods, open education, and cumulative synthesis are especially important in politically sensitive research areas, where selective reporting and analytic flexibility can easily distort conclusions. Transparency protects the credibility of both the work and the researcher.

Third, invest deeply in theory. Ideology is complex, multi-layered, and often poorly specified. Reading across psychology, political science, sociology, philosophy, and critical theory is not optional if one wants to make meaningful contributions. Strong theory is often the difference between findings that travel and those that remain context-bound.

Fourth, learn the hidden curriculum, and do not navigate it alone. Understanding how power, credit, authorship, and gatekeeping operate is essential, particularly for scholars from marginalized backgrounds. Seek communities, not just mentors. Collective networks, whether around open science, DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility), or shared research agendas, provide intellectual support, protection, and resilience that individual relationships rarely can.

Finally, write with public consequences in mind. Research on ideology, inequality, and political behavior shapes public discourse and policy debates. Conceptual precision and cautious interpretation are forms of responsibility. Overclaiming may be rewarded in the short term, but it undermines both science and trust in the long run.

Anything else to add?

Yes, two things. Science itself is political, not in terms of partisanship or even ideology, but in terms of power. FORRT’s work on open science and epistemic justice aims to ensure that transparency reforms do not unintentionally widen inequalities. Inclusion must be a design principle, not an afterthought. Second, I see political psychology as a tool for democratic resilience. Understanding how ideology and identities shape attitudes toward institutions, expertise, and collective threats is essential for navigating this social and political moment.

Scientific knowledge should be used to support—not undermine—social progress and social inclusion.

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