Staff profile

I study the ways in which stories motivate human behaviour. My theoretical focus is on value instantiation - the process through which universal evolutionarily-defined motivations get expressed in everyday behaviours. My applied work includes research on terrorism, health behaviour, electoral politics, climate and anti-war activism using traditional, and computational social science methods.

• Human Values
• Attitude Formation
• Social Influence
• Computational Social Science

Journal Article

• Grigoryan, L., Ponizovskiy, V., Weißflog, M. I., Osin, E., & Lickel, B. (online). Guilt, shame, and antiwar action in an authoritarian country at war. Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12985
• Doell, K. C., Todorova, B., Vlasceanu, M., Bak Coleman, J. B., Pronizius, E., Schumann, P., Azevedo, F., Patel, Y., Berkebile-Wineberg, M. M., Brick, C., Lange, F., Grayson, S. J., Pei, Y., Chakroff, A., van den Broek, K. L., Lamm, C., Vlasceanu, D., Constantino, S. M., Rathje, S., Goldwert, D., …Van Bavel, J. J. (in press). The International Climate Psychology Collaboration: Climate change-related data collected from 63 countries. Scientific Data, 11(1), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03865-1
• Vlasceanu, M., Doell, K. C., Bak-Coleman, J. B., Todorova, B., Berkebile-Weinberg, M. M., Grayson, S. J., Patel, Y., Goldwert, D., Pei, Y., Chakroff, A., Pronizius, E., van den Broek, K. L., Vlasceanu, D., Constantino, S., Morais, M. J., Schumann, P., Rathje, S., Fang, K., Aglioti, S. M., Alfano, M., …Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries. Science Advances, 10(6), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778
• Grigoryan, L., Ponizovskiy, V., & Schwartz, S. (2023). Motivations for violent extremism: Evidence from lone offenders’ manifestos. Journal of Social Issues, 79(4), 1440-1455. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12593
• Ponizovskiy, V., Grigoryan, L., Kühnen, U., & Boehnke, K. (2019). Social Construction of the Value–Behavior Relation. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00934