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Kevin (Vin) Arceneaux – Behavioral Foundations Lab Director


Kevin (Vin) Arceneaux is Thomas J. Freaney, Jr. Professor of Political Science, Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Public Affairs, and Director of the Behavioral Foundations Lab at Temple University. He studies how people make political decisions, paying particular attention to the effects of psychological biases. He has published articles on the influence of partisan campaigns on voting behavior, the effects of predispositions on attitude formation, the role of human biology in explaining individual variation in predispositions, and experimental methodology. His most recent book, Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability (2017, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Ryan Vander Wielen), takes a closer look at why people vary in their ability to get beyond their biases and explores the implications for citizens’ ability to live up to the demands of democracy. It won the 2018 Robert E. Lane Best Book Award from the APSA Political Psychology section and was co-winner of the 2018 APSA Experimental Research section’s book award. His last book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels: Partisan News in an Age of Choice (2013, University of Chicago Press, co-authored with Martin Johnson), studies how people’s partisan biases shapes the influence of political media. It was co-winner of the 2014 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

Professor Arceneaux has held visiting fellowships at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and the Sciences-Po Lyon. In 2012, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He is an active member of the APSA Experiments in Political Science section, a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) group, and a Laboratories of Democracies research affiliate. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Experimental Political Science and, along with Cindy Kam, as a co-editor for the Routledge Series on Experimental Political Science. He has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political ScienceJournal of PoliticsJournal of Behavioral Public Administration, and Political Communication.

Professor Arceneaux has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, CIRCLE, and Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University (2003). Before joining the faculty at Temple University, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University.

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