Adam Peresman
Publications | Working Papers | Teaching
Hello. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at The Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. The research which made up my PhD was focused on relationships between personality and political polarization and immigration attitudes. Since starting at Aarhus, my research has expanded into issues around reasoning, populism, and attitudes towards expertise. Recently, I have begun collaborating on a project centered on the experiences and perspectives of immigrants in Denmark.
My research is quantitatively oriented, encompassing both experimental and observational data.
I'm an American living in Denmark, and like the great American poets Walt Whitman and Mariah Carey, I originally come from Huntington, NY. I enjoy traveling, reading widely, chess, and slowly learning languages. That said, with an energetic toddler, my time (and energy) to pursue those interests is limited. I asked my partner what else was interesting and worth mentioning about myself. After some initial laughter, she said that I'm a 'pretty average dude'.
Please feel free to get in touch by email or follow me on đť•Ź. My CV can be found here.
Publications
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(2023) Divergent Responses to Local Diversity: Outgroup differences and the impact of personality
Social Science Research
Research has shown that differences in personality can help explain attitudes towards immigration. Personality may also moderate the impact of local immigrant levels. Using attitudinal measures from the British Election Study, this research confirms the importance of all Big Five personality traits in predicting immigration attitudes in the UK and finds consistent evidence of an interaction between extraversion and local immigrant concentrations. In areas with high levels of immigrants, extraverted individuals are associated with more supportive immigration attitudes. Moreover, this study shows that the response to local immigrant levels varies by immigrant group. Levels of nonwhite immigrants and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries are associated with greater levels of immigration hostility, whereas this is not the case for white immigrants or immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe. These findings demonstrate that an individual’s response to local immigration levels depends on both their personality and the immigrant group in question.
[Link to gated article] [Preprint]
(2023) Authoritarianism and Immigration Attitudes in the UK
Political Studies (with Royce Carroll and Hanna Bäck)
Opposition to immigration has featured prominently in the “cultural backlash” to globalization in Western nations and was a key determinant of Britain’s Brexit referendum. In this article, we draw on theories of intergroup threat to examine the effect of “right-wing authoritarianism” on immigration attitudes in the UK. Previous research suggests that cultural aspects of immigration are especially important in shaping anti-immigrant attitudes. We use an original survey measuring attitudes toward immigration from differing skill levels and national origins. We find that right-wing authoritarianism is a much stronger predictor of immigration attitudes than other attributes. In addition, the effect of right-wing authoritarianism varies by immigrant origin, most strongly predicting opposition toward immigrant groups that may be perceived as culturally distant. We also find evidence that these effects are driven by the “aggression” component of right-wing authoritarianism, a facet of authoritarianism that captures a predisposition toward the enforcement of group norms.
Working Papers
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Populists are skeptical to expert advice but respond to better arguments
With Lars Thorup Larsen, Honorata Mazepus, and Michael Bang Petersen
Across diverse policy domains from climate to health policy, there is broad concern about whether popular trust in science and expertise has eroded during the past decade. This has generated discussions about the growing influence of low-trust populists whose alleged turn against science may weaken the possibility of democratic policy-making built on facts and expertise. Using large, quota-based surveys with over 7,500 respondents across five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Czech Republic, we try to understand how populism impacts people's willingness to follow expert advice across four diverse scenarios. Using preregistered vignette experiments, we vary the expert advice, its source, and the quality of the argument, to see what persuades populists and non-populists to accept expert advice. We find first that populism is associated with less willingness to accept expert advice, yet with variation between countries and topics. Second, we find that both populists and non-populists are similarly impacted by stronger arguments. Finally, we show that populists are more likely to judge advice as poorly reasoned and to perceive it as politically biased. Our study indicates that while the rise of distrust may be troubling, populists not only listen to expertise, but also respond to the same qualities of expert advice as others, even if their skepticism is higher. This suggests that expert authorities should try to build trust and provide strong justifications for their expert advice rather than write off populists as being beyond the scope of reason.
Individually Informed: Personality, news consumption, and affective polarization
News consumption may be fueling affective polarization, and as media choices increase, individual factors such as personality may influence exposure patterns. Personality may also moderate the impact of news consumption and directly influence levels of hostility. This analysis of an original US survey (N = 855), examines the roles Big Five traits play in these processes. I find extraverted individuals are likely to consume more news overall, including more cross-ideological news. Extraversion is also associated with negative reactions to polarizing content. Agreeable individuals, in contrast, were associated with greater ideologically homogenous consumption patterns. Although news consumption was found to predict out-party hostility, this was not consistently moderated by personality traits. Personality, however, had direct effects on this hostility, with evidence that agreeableness and extraversion lower it, and neuroticism raises it. These results provide evidence that the effects of a diverse media environment should vary based on personality.
Teaching
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I enjoy teaching very much and believe it to be one of my most important tasks as an academic. While completing my PhD, I taught as a GTA on three courses, which covered a range of topic areas:
- Institutions of Democracy
- Measuring Public Opinion
- Politics and Economic Policies
US Political Polarization
This course provided a background to the many forms of political polarization and related phenomena. We evaluated the evidence that each is taking place and discussed how they might relate to each other. Additionally, we covered potential causes and consequences of increasing levels of polarization in the US.
Politics: the Role of Personality and Individual Differences
This course explored the roles that a wide range of individual differences may play in public opinion. This included "pure" personality measures like the Big Five, as well as more value-based measures such as authoritarianism. We also covered topics such as cognitive style, intelligence, and potential sex differences. A large focus of the course was on how to fairly evaluate and critique the research. It was also important for me that the material was considered from the larger perspectives of brain development and heritability.
The current incarnation of this homepage was inspired by Frederik Hjorth's.