Thematic Workstreams

At the heart of the 2025 EASP Summer School are the thematic workstreams – small, focused groups where students spend the first week of the Summer School diving deep into a specific area of social psychological research. These workstreams are designed to offer more than just content: they’re a chance to learn, reflect, challenge ideas, and form meaningful connections with peers and mentors who share your interests.

Each stream is led by experts in the field and shaped around a timely, complex theme—ranging from social identity and political division, to artificial intelligence, close relationships, and human-animal relations. The goal isn’t just to teach students about these areas, but to invite them into ongoing conversations at the cutting edge of social psychology.

Students explore foundational theories, current debates, and emerging methods. They will engage critically with the questions that drive each topic, and do it in a setting that values openness, curiosity, and collaboration. These workstreams are also a space to begin imagining what new research might look like—and how their own contributions could shape the field.

Whether their interests are theoretical, applied, empirical, or all of the above, the workstreams are designed to help student’s deepen their expertise and broaden their perspective. They’re also the launchpad for your group projects in week two, where students put ideas into action and co-create new research with fellow participants. They will then present to the whole cohort on the final day, offering them the opportunity to showcase their ideas and receive feedback.

The 2025 edition of the EASP Summer School is the largest to date, offering a choice between six workstreams lead by experts in their field from all around the world at different career stages:

  1. Social Identity, Extremism, Uncertainty, and Change. Taught by Dominic Abrams, Michael Hogg, and Fanny Lalot, this workstream explores social challenges of our time through the lens of identity, asking how they can be understood—and addressed—through social identity theory, and what new theoretical, methodological, and empirical directions lie ahead.
  2. Close Relationships. Taught by Viola Sallay and Tamás Martos, this workstream examines how the environments in which relationships unfold – our homes, communities, and borders – shape relational dynamics, health, and well-being.
  3. Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation. Taught by Karen Douglas and Sinan Alper, this workstream explores why people are drawn to conspiracy narratives, how they spread, and what their psychological and societal consequences are. 
  4. Political Cognition. Taught by Nikhil Sengupta, Robbie Sutton, and Joe Phillips, this workstream explores the psychological foundations of political belief and behaviour, with a focus on how ideologies form, why people differ in their political cognition, and how attitudes are shaped by social contexts.
  5. Moral Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Taught by Jim A.C. Everett and Madeline (“Gracie”) Reinecke, this workstreams considers both the moral psychology of AI and moral psychology with AI to think about what these emerging debates about our relationship with technology reveals about our values in an AI-mediated world.
  6. Human-Animal Relations. Taught by Kristof Dhont, Emma Alleyne, and Chris Hopwood, this workstream focuses on the social and moral psychology of human–animal relations and animal product consumption and asks why do people love and care about animals, yet also eat and exploit them.