Ismaharif Ismail broadly studies how media environments and social psychological processes shape national resilience and social cohesion. His recent work focuses on the development and understanding of interventions and meta-interventions.
Ismaharif is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. At the intersection of motivation science, social identity and the media, Ismaharif broadly studies group processes, intergroup relations and "wise" psychological interventions. His recent research examines barriers to civil discourse that hinder national progress, leveraging communication technologies (e.g., GenAI chatbots) to understand and address these motivational barriers. His work draws on social psychological theories and adopts a multi-method approach, including experimental designs, longitudinal studies, fieldwork interventions, big-team science, public datasets and computational methods.
Ismaharif's work has been published in leading journals from diverse disciplines such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Psychology, and Human Communication Research. His scholarship has been recognized internationally, including the Top Paper Award from the Intergroup Communication Division (2025) and Mass Communication Division (2020) of the International Communication Association, and the Gene Burd Top Three Paper Award from the Communication Technology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (2018). His research activities have been supported by various external (e.g., MOE-START Scheme and DSO National Laboratories) and internal funding sources (e.g., UCSB Regents Fellowship).
M.Soc.Sci. (2019) National University of Singapore, Social and Organizational Psychology
B.Soc.Sci. (2017) National University of Singapore, Psychology