Lisa-Maria Tanase, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge

Lisa-Maria Tanase is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology, at the University of Cambridge and is co supervised by the head of the Political Psychology Lab, Professor Lee De-Wit, the Director of the El Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy, Professor Lucia Reisch. Her doctoral research is at the intersection of political psychology, behavioural economics, and policy and is funded by the El Erian Institute. Her research interests include social and political decision-making, social conflicts and cooperation, and immunizing citizens against misinformation. Her PhD research aims to understand how political psychology and behavioural economics can inform the development of interventions helping senior political elites to take decisive climate action.

Prior to undertaking her PhD, she joined the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication as a research assistant. She was previously research assistant at the London School of Economics Behavioural Research Lab, where she worked on interventions to recalibrate risk perception and reduce biases. As a behavioural consultant at Innovia Tech, she worked to develop interventions improving safety, patients’ risk perception and adherence behaviour to medication. At the Winton Centre, her research focused on the communication of evidence and uncertainty in a variety of domains from policy interventions to healthcare and the legal sector. Her study as first author showed the influence of political elites on COVID-19 risk perception and hoax beliefs in the US, and is published in the Royal Society Open Science Journal.

Lisa-Maria completed an MSc Cognitive and Decision Science and a BSc in Arts and Sciences at UCL. She explored decision-making processes at complementary cognitive, behavioural, and political scales with an interdisciplinary combination of data analysis, experimental methods, and computer programming.