Maja BECKER

Maja Becker is a Professor at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, where she is affiliated with the Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie (CLLE) research unit. She serves as co-responsible for the master's program in Psychology and the Master PEPSCO track, and teaches advanced social psychology courses at the undergraduate level.

Her research focuses on cross-cultural social psychology, with particular emphasis on self/identity processes and their behavioral consequences. Becker investigates how individuals form attitudes and beliefs related to high-stakes societal issues including environmental concerns, political radicalization, gender equality, moral judgment, and well-being. A significant portion of her work explores the factors that reinforce or weaken prejudice and stereotypes toward various social groups. Her methodological approach typically combines theoretical frameworks from social identity theory with large-scale cross-cultural data collection.

Becker's recent publications demonstrate a strong commitment to multinational research design, with studies conducted across dozens of countries. Her work on populism examines how identity threat mediates the relationship between economic distress and populist attitudes, while her environmental research investigates how self-construals relate to environmental values across cultural contexts. She has developed measurement tools like the POPulist Thin Ideology Scale (POP-ThIS) and has contributed to understanding how cultural values (honor, face, dignity) moderate responses to social issues like migration.

As an active researcher, Becker collaborates with international teams across multiple continents, contributing to our understanding of how universal psychological processes interact with culturally specific contexts. Her work appears in high-impact journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.