Principal Investigator
Ili Ma
I am an assistant professor at Leiden University. My research aims to understand the processes that underlie how adolescents form beliefs and how these guide their decisions. I am particularly interested in adolescents’ susceptiblity to disinformation and the affective, social, and cognitive processes that shape false beliefs. I am committed to providing a supportive, inclusive, and collaborative environment for the members of my lab. As a member of the faculty council, I advocate for sustainable practices in research and education, and supportive learning environments for students.
We’re hiring!
We’re looking for a postdoc to join our team! The project is funded by Ili’s ERC StG on understanding and mitigating adolescents’ susceptibility to disinformation.
PhD students
Anne Snijders
Anne uses a multi-method approach to investigate adolescents’ susceptibility to misinformation and their online risky decisions. This project contributes to understanding how social media shapes adolescent development in today’s digital age. Co-advised by Neeltje Blankenstein and Anna van Duijvenvoorde.
Daniel Sensen
Daniel investigates how adolescents and young adults update their beliefs when consuming information on social media. Using a Bayesian framework, he examines how uncertainty, along with source and message characteristics, shape belief updates and susceptibility to misinformation among the youth. Co-advised with Wouter van den Bos (UvA).
Kyriaki Polykarpou
Kyriaki examines how persuasive techniques on social media shape adolescents’ susceptibility to misinformation across development. She combines natural language processing of social media data with experiments involving youth and large language models to better understand age differences in veracity judgments and to inform interventions that foster resilience. Co-advised by Anna van Duijvenvoorde and Wouter van den Bos (UvA).
Postdocs
Jiemiao Chen
Jiemiao is a postdoc funded by an AXA postdoctoral grant. She aims to understand attention to social media affordances using eye tracking.
Research master students
Kevin Oostrum (incoming PhD student, expected starting date: Feb 2026)
Kevin has a background in psychology and computer science. He is currently finishing his research masters project in the CoDe lab, where he aims to characterize age differences in social media content consumption and to understand the impact of social media content on adolescents’ beliefs. He uses large language models and other computational methods.
Peter Emck
Peter wants to understand social movements through a linguistic analysis of their advocacy, by focusing on elements such as rhetoric, motives, and frequent topics and sympathies. His project focusses on the manosphere.
Louise Mooshammer
Louise is a research master student in the clinical track. She aims to identify the relationship between mental health, information seeking and conspiracy beliefs.
Research Assistants
Sophie van Ooijen
Sophie is a second year bachelor’s student in Psychology. She helps the lab with various projects.