Laurence Cooley
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lpcooley.bsky.social
Laurence Cooley
@lpcooley.bsky.social
2K followers 1.7K following 88 posts
Politics lecturer, University of Birmingham

Work on the politics of deeply divided societies (mostly Northern Ireland these days), including power-sharing, demography and the census. Currently also thinking about Lough Neagh. UCU rep. #firstgen
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lpcooley.bsky.social
Quite the unexpected citation! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of the text: Conclusion Social psychologists have created an orderly and predictable world of theory development and hypothesis testing within which to practice their science. Yet, ironically, the things that are most predictable (e.g., that the participant will write a number to answer a Likert scale rather than set their questionnaire on fire) are usually out of scope of their models. However, it is easy to imagine circumstances where "setting on fire" would be a socially meaningful response to a questionnaire (e.g., Cooley, 2024), but which would be forever out of sight if valid survey responses are our only view of the world. This paper has indicated ways in which a complex systems view, supported by developments in computational modelling, can help our discipline actualise its promise to become a "science of movement".
May 9, 2025 at 8:47 AM
lpcooley.bsky.social
I finished reading this this weekend. The amount of research that clearly went into it shines through, and given the news from Syria, the tough closing chapters feel all the more relevant today.
Elif Shafak's novel There are Rivers in the Sky
December 8, 2024 at 3:56 PM
lpcooley.bsky.social
Very kind of Peter to include me in this. I was enjoying a particularly good pint of Guinness in a Dublin pub after #PSAI2024 when all the follow notifications started coming in. It might take a while for me to follow back but I'll get to it.
Two pints of Guinness on a pub table
October 22, 2024 at 8:59 AM