John-Paul Martindale
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Address
- Street
-
3.15, School of History, Classics & Archaeology
- City
- Old Medical School, Elsie Inglis Quadrangle,
- Post code
- EH8 9AG
Availability
Please contact me at jmartind@ed.ac.uk if you would like to get in touch.
Background
I am a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Weaponised Pasts in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.
The purpose of our project is to examine how the past is re-interpreted and weaponised to define and antagonise out-groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities; a phenomenon we describe as heritage-based hostility. We are combining naturalistic big data from newspapers and social media with lab experiments to examine the causal mechanisms of the spread of heritage-based hostility using cultural evolution as an overarching theoretical framework. Our research is also informed by cognitive science and personality psychology.
Personality psychology is my background, for my PhD I developed a best-in-class measure of the Dark Triad of Psychopathy, Narcissism and Machiavellianism. I then worked as a Lecturer in Different Psychology in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences before taking on my current role. Alongside our Weaponised Pasts project I continue psychological research into scale development and the best practice measurement of antagonistic personality traits.
Undergraduate teaching
I am not currently teaching, but I have led and taught on several modules including Data Analysis for Psychological Research (Statistics and R Programming), Applied Psychometrics, Human Personality, Psychology in Action (career module) and Introduction to Differential Psychology. I have also supervised dozens of MSc projects.
Research summary
My specific research focuses are on how we can best measure personality without 'ground truth' data, such as in naturalistic language data exctracted from social media. I am interested in extending personality measurement into new contexts, and being able to examine how personality predicts a variety of social and political attitudes to the past and present, and the consequences this has for vulnerable groups in society.