Neil Lavie-Driver

Neil is a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Originally from London, he graduated with a first-class degree and award-winning dissertation in Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Following this, he was awarded a Masters degree in Social and Cultural Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In the masters, he achieved the grade of a high distinction and wrote a thesis exploring how the decline in the salience of a particular collective memory with time (the collective memory of WW2) might allow for a resurgence of attitudes the collective memory had previously stigmatised: specifically - populism, nationalism and antisemitism. As a PhD student, Neil’s research interests lie in the relevance of social identity processes to belief in online misinformation and extremism, e.g. in contexts of intergroup conflict and outgroup hostility. His work also explores whether models such as inoculation theory, so far primarily used as an intervention against misinformation of low identity salience, can be adapted to counter identity-driven online misinformation and extremism.