Sean Stevens

Sean Stevens is FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor. He is a native of New Jersey, who obtained his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick in 2013. From 2013 to 2016, he continued to work at Rutgers University, first as the Research Director of the Social Perception Lab and then as a Postdoctoral Fellow, also in affiliation with the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2016, Sean became Heterodox Academy’s first Director of Research where he developed the Campus Expression Survey. Five years later in 2020, Sean joined FIRE as a Senior Research Fellow in Polling and Analytics. For almost two decades, Sean’s research has focused on understanding how moral convictions produce motivated reasoning within the political domain, how this motivated reasoning can distort research in the social sciences, and how motivated reasoning can lead to political intolerance and create obstacles to political compromise. Sean has collaborated on the development of numerous psychometric measures including a Left-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Costello et al.), the Moral Foundations Questionnaire–2 (Atari et al.), and a revised Willingness to Censor scale (Lambe et al.), while his more recent work at FIRE investigates the psychological factors that motivate support for censorship and self-censorship. He is also a member of the Best Practices in Science Movement, and works to promote scientific integrity practices in the social sciences.