Dr Chiara Bonacchi awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant

The School is delighted to announce that Dr Chiara Bonacchi has been awarded a  Research Project Grant by the Leverhulme Trust, as Principal Investigator, for the three-year project ‘Weaponised Pasts: The Evolution of Heritage-based Hostility on Social Media’. The project will be undertaken with Co-Investigators, Dr Zachary Horne, based in Psychology, at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Alberto Acerbi, from the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. 

The project will break new ground both methodologically and empirically by studying the evolution of heritage-based hostility on social media. Justifying antagonistic othering through interpretations of the past is known as heritage-based hostility. Such hostility can undermine democratic discourse online, causing distress and translating into violence offline. Yet, the interplay of factors leading to the diffusion of hostile interpretations of the past on social media remains unknown. 

Without establishing how heritage-based hostility emerges and spreads, and why some narratives are pervasive, it has not been possible to curtail this phenomenon. This is one of the most consequential research problems within public archaeology, heritage and identity studies today. ‘Weaponised Pasts’ will address it using a novel approach that combines, for the first time, public archaeology, cultural evolution and psychological theories with cutting-edge, data-intensive and experimental methods. The methodology involves two complementary strands that will analyse real-world and experimental data about the dissemination of archaeological discoveries published in UK-based newspapers and shared on social media. Based on the results, the team will provide recommendations for limiting the diffusion of heritage-based hostility online. 

Dr Bonacchi said, “We are delighted for this award, which allows us to conduct the first study combining transmission chain experiments involving human participants (a controlled laboratory version of the “telephone game”) with large-scale text mining, to understand the content-specific and context-related factors that predict the emergence of hostility from communications about the past on social media. We are deeply grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for enabling this highly interdisciplinary research, which would have been very difficult to complete otherwise”. 

Dr Horne said: "I am thrilled by this grant news as this project opens up a new area of research in cognitive science, allowing us to break new ground connecting people's understanding of the past with core questions about analogy and attitude change."