Keynotes

Keynote 1: Making the Personal Political: The Role of Narcissism in Political Attitudes and Behaviours

by Aleksandra Cichocka, Professor of Political Psychology, University of Kent, UK

Monday, 15 September, 2025 | 13:20-14:20 | Saal 2a/2b

In order to make informed political decisions, it is important to understand the psychological factors that influence political convictions and behaviours. Given the prevalence of narcissistic tendencies among political leaders, it is key to examine the role narcissistic beliefs about oneself and one's social groups play in politics. In this talk, I will review survey and experimental research demonstrating that individual and collective narcissism can pose challenges to democratic functioning, social cohesion, as well as harmonious international relations. I will also present new studies which rely on LLMs to identify narcissistic identity rhetoric in text and examine whether such rhetoric resonates with the public and predicts electoral outcomes. I will discuss implications for understanding political leadership, social movements, and policy support.

Keynote 2: What do we talk about when we say “that is an interesting study”?

by Paul Van Lange, Professor of Psychology, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Tuesday, 16 September, 2025 | 11:00-12:00 | Saal 2a/2b

Like many things in life, research comes in many flavors. In our roles as authors, reviewers, and editors, we evaluate things such as “magnitude of the contribution” or share a comment such as “this is an interesting study”.  But what exactly makes a study interesting – or worthwhile?  In this presentation, I evaluate a selection of collaborative studies that I continue to find interesting.  And with a more objective look, I provide arguments for why exactly they are interesting. Clearly, studies can be interesting in a variety of ways (there are many roads to Rome), but sometimes they are in advance bound to be interesting and worthwhile. What are those studies that are predictably important? And what kind of theoretical paper is predictably important? In this presentation, I evaluate the various roads to Rome we can take, evaluating several paradigms that yield contributions that are interesting and worthwhile – to fellow scientists and (ideally) beyond.