PhD Topic: Sociocultural Turn: Understanding the Complexities of Political Ideology, Information Consumption and Persuasion

PhD Supervisors: Dr Jens Madsen and Professor Bradley Franks

Chen-Ta is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS) at the London School of Economics (LSE). His academic interests lie at the intersection of political psychology, geopolitics, and social impacts of digital technologies. Chen-Ta’s doctoral project is entitled ‘Sociocultural Turn: Investigating the Complexities of Political Ideologies and Belief in Political Information’. Through mixed methods (surveys, in-depth interviews, and experiments), he aims to critically examine multiple effects, such as divided political identities, perceived moral foundations, and emotional arousal, in the process of political (dis)information consumption, from information access and interpretation to belief updating.

Currently, Chen-Ta teaches classes in Cognitive Psychology and Developmental Psychology at LSE, as well as Introduction to Social Science Research and Discovering Quantitative and Qualitative Methods at the Social Research Institute (SRI), University College London (UCL). In addition, he works as a part-time research officer at the LSE Eden Centre, where he supervises Economics, Law, and PBS students in conducting research towards the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for LSE Congress. Chen-Ta won the best class teaching award at the LSE in 2024.

Prior to joining the PBS department, Chen-Ta held various research-related roles in both industry and academia. He was Head of Research at a global financial information services firm based in London, where he collaborated with over 400 economists and political scientists across various sectors (e.g. World Bank, IMF, PwC, OECD, UNDP, BNP Paribas, Johns Hopkins University) to produce global country risk outlooks. Chen-Ta was also invited as a guest lecturer to present his research findings in industry at Exeter University, POLIS at the University of Cambridge, EDHEC Business School (France), and Vaasa University (Finland).

Chen-Ta has been involved in academia since 2014. He was a graduate researcher and associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he researched and taught on cultural studies and interpersonal communications on social media. While working as a part-time research officer at LSE in 2019, he organised and presented the panel ‘Theorising Mobile Communication, Researching Mobility: Twenty Years of Perpetual Contact and Beyond’ within the Mobile Communication Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA) annual conference. In 2023, he served as a guest lecturer, teaching about effective leadership, the impact of AI, and organisational change for a summer school at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.

Chen-Ta holds an MSt in Social Innovation from the Cambridge Judge Business School, where his dissertation ‘Digital Workplace and Gender (In)equality among Working Parents in Post-COVID-19 Britain’ was awarded a distinction. He also earned an MSc in Social Research Methods with a focus on media and communications at LSE and an MA in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London (KCL). Before moving to the UK, he lived in Taipei, studying and working in the media arts and strategic communications fields.