A Cornell College research team is spending the summer studying a question that has become increasingly important in today’s political climate: What happens when people choose to share or hide their political beliefs?

Through the Cornell Summer Research Institute, Assistant Professor of Psychology Samantha Heiman is leading students Luis Andres Roman Bonilla and Valentin Andrade in an eight week research project exploring why people choose to share or keep their political beliefs private and how those decisions affect the way others see them.

“We’ve been working on generally questions about, do people intentionally express their political identity? Do they conceal their political identity? And what are some of the consequences of that?” Heiman said.

For the study, participants read fictional workplace scenarios in which a person’s clothing, hairstyle, and other choices either hinted at or hid their political beliefs. Researchers then measured whether participants correctly identified the person’s political views and how they thought those choices would affect the individual’s sense of belonging, identity, and social acceptance.

The project examines a topic that has received relatively little attention in psychology, even as politics has become a more visible part of many people’s daily lives.

“It’s impossible to avoid politics,” Andrade said. “We think it’s just important for us to understand how people feel about their political identity. But also, there’s not a lot of research about how political identity can be an identity that can be hidden or expressed. We’re trying to bridge that gap in the literature.”

Throughout the summer, the team has experienced every stage of the research process. After receiving approval from Cornell’s Institutional Review Board, which reviews studies involving human participants to ensure they meet ethical standards, the researchers collected survey data, analyzed the results, and began designing a follow up study.

“We’ve really gotten to go through all the parts of that,” Heiman said. “We started with getting IRB approval, collected data, did data analysis, wrote up all the methods and results, and now we’re back in that conceptual phase.”

One of the team’s most unexpected findings involved how participants believed people would feel when their political identity was recognized.

The researchers initially expected participants would think people feel most comfortable when others correctly recognize their political beliefs after they intentionally express them. Instead, they found that most participants believed people feel more comfortable when their political beliefs are not acknowledged at all.

“Overall when people just don’t acknowledge the identity or address it at all, it makes people feel more comfortable,” Andrade said. “I think that gives us an insight on how comfortable people are in this specific context to just talk about these kinds of topics.”

The study also found participants tended to assume that people who concealed their political identity were experiencing greater social discomfort.

“As soon as people hear that someone’s concealing their political identity, they’re assuming that person is feeling more social identity threat, they’re feeling less belonging and a lot of these negative identity related feelings,” Heiman said. “Understanding what that concealment is cueing to people is an important takeaway from this.”

Roman Bonilla said the findings could eventually help people better understand why conversations surrounding politics can feel uncomfortable and how those situations develop.

“The research we’re doing is helping to clear up why people might feel a certain way when it comes to either expressing or concealing their identity,” he said. “That then can give us better tools to deal with those uncomfortable situations.”

Heiman hopes the research will encourage people to think more carefully about the assumptions they make about others.

“We could be interpreting things as signals of political identity that aren’t necessarily signals,” she said. “Building a little bit more awareness of that fact helps people understand what judgments they might be making and how they might be making people feel.”

The research is part of Cornell College’s Summer Research Institute, an interdisciplinary eight week program that pairs small groups of students with faculty mentors to conduct original research across a variety of academic fields. Students participate in every phase of the process, from developing research questions and collecting data to analyzing results and preparing manuscripts for publication.

The team plans to continue the project after the summer by collecting another round of data before submitting the completed research to an academic journal focused on identity and social psychology.

For Andrade and Roman Bonilla, the experience has also helped shape their futures as both students are considering pursuing graduate school.

“For me, it was especially like a trial,” Andrade said. “If I don’t enjoy doing this, then I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Just being able to do it and enjoy it gave me confirmation that this is something that I want to continue to pursue.”