About

Flavio is a Brazilian assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at Utrecht University. He held an equivalent position at the Social Psychology department at the University of Groningen from 2023 to April 2024. His research primarily focuses on (1) the political psychology of ideological attitudes and their psychological underpinnings; and (2) integrating open science into higher education.

Flavio was a research associate at the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and a Fulbright fellow at New York University, New York, USA. Flavio held additional postdoc positions at the Saxony’s Center for Criminological Research (ZFKS) and at the Communication Department of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Flavio obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science with a thesis entitled "Ideologies, Ideological Asymmetries, and the Psychological Roots of Political Behavior" at the Center for Comparative Politics of the University of Cologne, a German Excellence Center, obtaining summa cum laude for his disputation and magna cum laude for his dissertation work.

The main question driving my research is why do some believe that a nation, people, race, gender, or species is justified in dominating, controlling, and exploiting another? I study the role of ideology and identity in justifying social and economic injustices. I focus on the psychology of conservatism, which can materialize as an endorsement of inequality, resistance to change, attitudes supporting the maintenance of existing wealth, income, or opportunity gaps, and also as the rejection of access to rights based on group characteristics. I have also done work on the psychology underlying neoliberalism, libertarianism, and populism. I am interested in —and conduct research on— Survey Methodology, Measurement, & Metascience.

My publications are delineated here. I have published in several internationally recognized academic outlets in the fields of Psychology, Political Science, Political Psychology, and interdisciplinary journals such as Nature’s [Human Behavior, Communications (in press)], Political Psychology [1, 2], Politics, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations [1, 2], Social Psychological and Personality Science, Journal of Social Issues, Psychological Inquiry, & Translational Issues in Psychological Science [1, 2].

I am the principal investigator of The Psychology of Political Behavior Studies (PPBS), an ongoing series of quota-based national cross-sections and panel studies containing a set of repeating core questions on the topics of social and political attitudes, values, voting, and political participation.

I co-founded and direct FORRT —A Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training— an award-winning interdisciplinary initiative that aims to integrate open scholarship principles into higher education and to advance research transparency, reproducibility, rigor, and ethics through pedagogical reform.

As for awards, in 2021, our article on the measurement of Populism received the ‘Best  Article Prize of  2020’ at Journal Politics (announcement, social media). In 2020, I was named as one of the 100 most influential early career Portuguese via the “Global Shapers“ initiative by the World Economic Forum. In 2019, our article on American conservatism and neoliberal ideology (and its psychology) was among Wiley’s top-cited, read, and downloaded articles. In 2018, I won a Fulbright Research Award and subsequently visited Professor John Jost at New York University (Social Justice Lab). During my Ph.D., I have also visited Professor Pascal Perrineau and Dr. Steven Van Hauwaert at Science Po (chercheur invité), Paris, France; Professors Robbie Sutton and Dr. Aleksandra Cichocka at the School of Psychology, Kent University, Canterbury, UK; and Professor Josh Tybur at VU Amsterdam.

My research has been featured in Scientific American, The Huffington Post, The Hill, Los Angeles Times, Vox, The Intercept, The Conversation, Slate, LSE Blog, APA’s Science Brief, Psychology Today [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], PsyPost [1, 2, 3], Fauna Analytics, Yahoo! News, Nieman Journalism Lab, MinnPost, amongst other US outlets. It has also been mentioned in German popular press [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], Brazilian popular press, the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right & UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life.

As part of my academic service, I am a member of the German Political Psychology Network’s Steering Committee. I serve as the IT manager for Jena’s Institute of Communication. I am a survey methodologist for Team Populism and I am affiliated with Cologne's Center for Comparative Politics and Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology (ISS), and University of Jena’s Schumpeter Center for Research on Socio-Economic Change (JSEC). As an advocate for the improvement of research, teaching, and mentoring practices, I am an open science Ambassador for the Centre for Open Science, an open science Catalyst for the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITTS), a fellow for the Project Tier, and I am affiliated with the German Reproducibility Network, Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB), and Germany’s Netzwerk der Open-Science-Initiativen (NOSI).

I have taught as the lecturer of record Intergroup Relations & Intergroup Communication, Research Design and Analysis I & II for two consecutive years, as well as Personality & Individual Differences, Research Methods: Survey Methodology, and several courses in R, RStudio, & Reproducible Reports at undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels. I have also taught statistics and R courses and workshops at New York University, Kent University, Koblenz-Landau, and Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam. Before undertaking a Ph.D., I worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University, the Netherlands. I also assisted in teaching in a variety of statistics-related courses at Leiden’s Faculty of Science, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. 

As a means to subsidize my studies (and now to pay off student loans), I work as a statistical consultant for a number of departments at high-ranking universities. For more information, please see here.

At Leiden University, the Netherlands, I was formally educated in Political Science, Social Psychology & Statistics (Masters level). I also studied Human Rights at Geneva University. I hold a BA in Psychology from Coimbra University.

See my CV (at the bar on the right) for the most updated info on my published work, preprints, ongoing projects, awards, funding, and service.

Lastly, R and statistical tutorials, along with collected resources, as well as blog posts about research, academic resources, academic culture, ECR experiences, & open science can be found here.

In my spare time, I enjoy taking photographs, you can find a few of them here (and I wrote a bit about it here).

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