Our People and Interests

 


Lab Directors

John R. Hibbing
Foundation Regents University Professor of Political Science
Ph.D, University of Iowa, 1980

Fields:
Biology and Politics, Political Psychology, Public Opinion, American Politics, Legislative Politics.

For nearly 20 years, John Hibbing studied Congress, congressional careers, congressional elections, comparative legislatures, and public opinion toward Congress. About a decade ago, he and John Alford (Rice University) began investigating the role of biological factors in explaining political variation. They were soon joined by Kevin Smith (see below). Currently, they are engaged in projects involving the effects of cortisol levels on voter turnout, the effects of Androstenone detection on political attitudes, physiological variations as correlates of political ideology and involvement, variation across the political spectrum in cognitive tasks such as the flanker task, frustration task, and emotion discrimination task, gaze cuing, eyetracking technology, physiological responses to aversive stimuli, twin studies in the United States, Denmark, and Australia, cross-national physiology, brain imaging (both EEG and fMRI), molecular genetics, and economic games. He previously edited the Legislative Studies Quarterly, served as Chair of the American Political Science Association's Legislative Studies Section, co-authored Congress as Public Enemy and Stealth Democracy (with Elizabeth Theiss-Morse), received the Fenno Prize, and served as a NATO Fellow in Science, a Senior Fulbright Fellow, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, and a Velux Senior Resarch Fellow at Sydansk University in Denmark. 

Hibbing C.V.


jhibbing@unl.edu

 


Kevin B. Smith
Professor of Political Science
Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1994

Fields:
Public policy, Public Administration, American Politics, Biology and Politics

Kevin Smith spent more than a decade studying public policy, public administration and bureaucratic behavior. About ten years ago he became interested in the biological basis of attitudes and behavior, especially in how the theories and methods of cognitive psychology, behavioral genetics, and psychophysiology might be employed to better understand political traits. For most of that time he has closely collaborated with John Hibbing (see above) and John Alford (Rice University) on a range of research projects that investigate biological correlates of political, social and economic behavior and attitudes. The latter include serving as Co-PI on project to create the first-ever data set specifically designed to investigate the heritability of political, social and economic traits (available on this website), co-founding the UNL Political Physiology Lab, and being a Co-PI on the Human Social Dynamics (HSD) project, an NSF-funded project that is the first attempt to investigate a comprehensive set of biological markers of political behavior (genes, physiology, endocrinology, brain imaging) on a representative sample of adult citizens. He has authored or co-authored nine books as well as dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He has served as co-editor of State Politics & Policy Quarterly, was a long-time director of the UNL Political Science Graduate Program, chairs UNL's Systems Biology of Social Behavior initiative, and is a recent recipient of the College of Arts and Science's Outstanding Research and Creative Achievement award.  

Smith C.V.

ksmith1@unl.edu

Personal website

Graduate Students

 Several current graduate students have focused a significant portion of their energies on research associated with the Political Physiology Lab.  Three of these individuals (Amanda, Mike, and Carly) are on the market in 2011 and are highly recommended. All three of them have significant skills in the area of biology and politics and also in more traditional areas as is further specified in the write-ups below. They would be wonderful additions to any Department. 

 

 


Amanda Balzer
Ph.D Student


Fields:
Biology and Politics, Behavior Genetics, Political Psychology, Political Behavior, Politics and Religion, Family Socialization, Public Opinion, and Gender and Politics 

In American society, religious beliefs and political issue attitudes often overlap, and it seems to me that both kinds of belief originate from an innate disposition oriented toward a packaged set of bedrock principles - shaped by genetics, biology and the environment. The work being done at UNL with the psychophysiology lab and twin studies is helping to unravel these questions. 

Personal website

amanda.balzer@huskers.unl.edu

 

Michael Gruszczynski
Ph.D Student


Fields:
Political psychology, political communication, information processing, cognition

It is difficult to fully understand human behavior within the political realm without first understanding the psychological and physiological mechanisms that underlie that behavior. When citizens encounter political stimuli and information, whether and how they make use of such environmental inputs is driven by an interaction between innate psychological/physiological processes and the external environment. Thus understanding these underlying mechanisms is paramount to our understanding of political behavior.

Personal website 

mikegruz@huskers.unl.edu

 

 


Carly Jacobs
Ph.D Student


Fields:
Political psychology, group identity and categorization, gender, religion and politics

Embracing the interaction between the environment and our biology/physiology provides new perspective on previously intractable problems and supplies novel hypotheses about important political phenomena. In the case of group identity, taking into account fundamental biological or physiological predispositions toward outgroups-whether they tend to be viewed as menacing or interesting-can help to explain politically significant variation in attitudes and preferences about the treatment of different groups in society. 

Personal website

cjacobs@huskers.unl.edu

 

Kristin Anderson
Ph.D Student


Fields:
Political psychology, information processing, cogntion, personality, and gender


kd.anderson@huskers.unl.edu

Karl Giuseffi
Ph.D Student
 

 

Fields:

American Politics, Biology and Politics, Political Psychology, Public Opinion, Personality, Information Processing, Cognition, Emotion, and Political Communication

 

Biopolitics is a new, relatively unexplored, subfield of political science that unites psychology, biology, and politics. This approach to political science holds the potential to provide more complete answers to questions that have long bedeviled traditional political science. Because physiological responses underlie all human action, they are almost certainly relevant to individuals' political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.


karl.giuseffi@huskers.unl.edu

 

 

Tim Collins
Ph.D Student


Fields:
American Politics, Political Physiology & Behavior, Evolutionary Politics, and Political Communication


Through the work being done at UNL on the biological origins of political attutides and behaviors and physiological and behavioral outputs thereof, we are constantly improving our understanding--as a discipline--of why and how people hold the beliefs they do. I greatly admire our department's intellectual makeup and curiosity, and the fact that we are regularly driving toward a larger understanding of our very special species and civilized body politic. 


timcollins@huskers.unl.edu