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| Political Behavior Laboratory | |
|---|---|
| Name | Political Behavior Laboratory |
| Type | Research institute |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Location | Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Fields | Political psychology, political communication |
| Director | Lisa Feldman |
Political Behavior Laboratory The Political Behavior Laboratory is an academic research unit focused on empirical study of voter decision-making, political persuasion, and civic participation. It conducts controlled experiments, survey research, and field interventions collaborating with universities, think tanks, and civic organizations. The Laboratory has worked with scholars and practitioners associated with Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University.
The Laboratory was founded to bridge experimental methods from Stanford Prison Experiment-inspired designs and survey innovations associated with American National Election Studies and General Social Survey traditions. Early leadership drew on faculty with appointments at Harvard Kennedy School, Yale University, and Columbia University and partnerships with the Pew Research Center and Brookings Institution. It emphasizes replication standards popularized after debates involving Reproducibility Project contributors and methodological reforms advocated by figures linked to National Science Foundation funding.
Research spans voter psychology, political persuasion, misinformation, and civic mobilization, intersecting with literatures associated with Prospect Theory, Cognitive Dissonance, and studies from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on ethical testing. Methods include randomized controlled trials modeled on designs from Angrist–Imbens framework, web-based experiments referencing platforms like those used in Amazon Mechanical Turk studies, laboratory neuroimaging collaborations with teams from National Institutes of Health, and large-N observational analysis inspired by work at Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. They employ measurement techniques related to approaches by Paul Ekman, eye-tracking protocols used in Ben-Gurion University collaborations, and behavioral economics paradigms linked to Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler.
Notable projects include randomized voter mobilization trials in partnership with Rock the Vote, persuasion framing experiments during election cycles studied alongside researchers from Annenberg Public Policy Center, misinformation correction interventions coordinated with First Draft News affiliates, and civic deliberation fieldwork informing National Task Force on Civic Learning. Findings replicated effects documented in literature from Stanford Internet Observatory and showed heterogeneous treatment effects similar to those reported by Get Out The Vote campaigns and analyses in The Washington Post-covered studies. Cross-national comparative work used designs comparable to European Social Survey and referenced case studies from United Kingdom general election, 2019 and 2016 United States presidential election research.
The Laboratory follows ethical protocols influenced by policies at Institutional Review Boards commonly established at Yale School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley. It uses preregistration conventions promoted by the Open Science Framework and reporting standards advocated by American Political Science Association. Experimental designs often adapt consent procedures discussed in debates involving Belmont Report principles and incorporate data privacy practices aligned with guidelines from Federal Trade Commission and General Data Protection Regulation-related interpretations used by research centers at University of Oxford.
Affiliations include collaborations with centers at Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, and research institutes such as the RAND Corporation. Funding sources have included grants from the National Science Foundation, awards from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, project support from MacArthur Foundation, and contract work with election administration bodies like Federal Election Commission-adjacent programs. They have received in-kind support from technology partners including collaborations reminiscent of projects with Google Research and infrastructure assistance paralleling Qualtrics deployments.
Directors and senior researchers have included faculty with appointments at Harvard Kennedy School, Princeton University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Duke University, University of Michigan, and University of California, Los Angeles. Postdoctoral fellows and research assistants have pursued careers at institutions such as London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, Sciences Po, University of Toronto, and think tanks including Council on Foreign Relations and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Visiting scholars have come from the Max Planck Institute and research centers linked to European University Institute.
The Laboratory’s work has informed media coverage by outlets like The New York Times, The Economist, BBC News, and NPR, and contributed to policy discussions at United States Congress hearings and briefings for state election offices. Public-facing initiatives included workshops with Rock the Vote, training modules for civic educators used in Teach For America programs, and collaboration on fact-checking pilots with organizations related to PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. Its datasets are archived in repositories similar to Dataverse and cited in reports by Pew Research Center and Brookings Institution.