Zheng ZHOU

I study how perceived social exclusion and identity-based threats fuel political radicalization and erode democratic legitimacy. My research centers on identity anxiety and symbolic threat as psychological mechanisms driving far-right support and undermining ontological security. At its core, my research asks how exclusion-induced identity anxiety reshapes political behavior across levels, from individual attitudes to public trust and collective alignment, as well as public responses to international crises and territorial disputes under identity threat. Drawing on comparative public opinion surveys, I investigate how historical cognition and economic precarity interact with political dissonance to generate nationalist backlash, especially in contexts of identity-based geopolitical disputes and state-led coercive action.

Methodologically, I integrate causal inference techniques, formal modeling, and survey experiments with visual and computational analysis. My research traces how emotion, belief, and information environments jointly structure political behavior and collective alignments in response to geopolitical crises, intergroup conflict, and coercive state interventions.

• Primary fields: Political psychology; nationalism and identity; far-right politics; ontological security
• Methods: Causal inference; survey and experimental design; formal modeling