Malia Marks

Malia is studying the psychological drivers of support for authoritarian governance, and is funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Program. She began her studies at Harvard where she obtained a BA in psychology with Highest Honors, having completed an empirical research thesis on short-term risk factors for suicide in psychiatric inpatients. She then completed a MPhil in Criminological Research at Cambridge's Institute of Criminology, earning a distinction and placing first for her research on the victim-offender overlap and psychological impact of violent victimization over time. In her current work, Malia is using exploratory statistical analyses and applying theories from social psychology to improve the field's understanding of the right wing authoritarianism scale, as well as to develop an alternative scale for authoritarianism with improved cross-cultural validity. She is also collaborating on a range of projects, using time-series analysis and large language model classifiers to analyze social media data.