About

Stefan Leach

Lecturer in PsychologyUniversity of Southampton(incoming)

About

I am an incoming Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Southampton, UK. My expertise is in social and moral psychology, as well as big data and natural language processing.

✉️ stefan@stefanleach.com

📤 Download CV

Interests

Political identity & engagement
Social media
Big data & natural language processing
Moral circles

Education

🎓 PhD Social Psychology

University of Kent

🎓 MSc Research Methods

University of Kent

🎓 BSc Psychology

University of York

📚 Research

I take a broad and interdisciplinary approach to my work, using experiments and large-scale computational methods to understand a range of pressing societal issues, recently:

My work can be found in peer-reviewed journals such as: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Cognition, British Journal of Psychology, and Social Personality and Psychological Science.

📰 Select Works

An exhaustive list of my publications can be found here.

Politicians’ use of national identity rhetoric on social media predicts engagement and electoral success

Stefan Leach, Jan Nikadon, Chiara Zazzarino, Magda Formanowicz, Aleksandra Cislak, Michal Kosinki, Jay Van Bavel, & Aleksandra Cichocka

PsyArXiv - 2025

Moral outrage predicts the virality of petitions for change on social media, but not the number of signatures they receive

Stefan Leach, Magda Formanowicz, Jan Nikadon, & Aleksandra Cichocka

Social Psychological and Personality Science - 2025

Word embeddings reveal growing moral concern for people, animals and the environment

Stefan Leach, Andrew Kitchin, & Robbie Sutton

British Journal of Social Psychology - 2023

Are we smart enough to remember how smart animals are?

Stefan Leach, Robbie Sutton, Kristof Dhont, Karen Douglas, & Zara Bergstrom

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - 2023

Changing minds about minds: Evidence that people are too sceptical about animal sentience

Stefan Leach, Robbie Sutton, Kristof Dhont, Karen Douglas, & Zara Bergstrom

Cognition - 2023

👨‍🏫 Teaching

I have taught a range of modules over the years, covering advanced statistics, attitudes and social cognition, business psychology, and natural language processing.

Students working with me as their supervisor are encouraged to make use of the resource below, which I have put together to help with their dissertation projects.