Conflict Tipping Podcast Episode 9: Jan Gerrit Voelkel, Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Stanford University

October 24, 2022

In this episode Laura interviews Jan Gerrit Voelkel, who is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Stanford University.

Jan’s research studies intergroup and interpersonal relationships with two guiding research questions. First, what causes people’s willingness to harm others and defend inequalities? And second, how can personal or societal change be achieved that increases equality and/or reduces harm?

Jan has developed interventions that increase support for policies that aim to reduce economic inequality or increase opportunity for immigrants. Jan has also led the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a mega-study that tested 25 crowdsourced interventions for reducing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity.

Jan’s academic page: https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/jan-gerrit-voelkel

Jan’s twitter: https://twitter.com/jgvoelkel

Project: https://www.strengtheningdemocracychallenge.org/

Lab twitter: https://twitter.com/pascl_stanford

Jan Gerrit Voelkel

Jan's research studies intergroup and interpersonal relationships with two guiding research questions. First, what causes people's willingness to harm others and defend inequalities? For example, Jan's research has found that categorizing others into ingroups and outgroups is so powerful that it even shapes the application of moral principles that are thought to be… MORE >

Laura May

Laura is a freelancer, former Executive Director of the International Mediation Institute and a negotiation and mediation lecturer. Her doctoral research asked “in what ways does blame make villains in politics” and covered the gamut from literature studies and linguistics to psychology and neuroscience, victimology to political science. Her expertise includes emotions,… MORE >