Sean Stevens

Sean, FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor, obtained his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick in 2013. At FIRE, Sean directs our College Free Speech Rankings and the National Speech Index. He also manages the Campus Deplatforming Database. Prior to joining FIRE in 2020, Sean was the Research Director of the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University in New Brunswick and then later a Postdoctoral Fellow there (also in affiliation with the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University). In 2016 he then joined Heterodox Academy as its first Director of Research where he developed the Campus Expression Survey. Over the past decade, Sean has collaborated with academics across the country on the psychometric validation of numerous scales and surveys, including a Left-Wing Authoritarianism scale, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2, and a revised Willingness to Censor Scale (presented at the National Communication Association’s annual conference in 2024). He is also a member of the Best Practices in Science Movement, which aims to promote scientific integrity practices in the social sciences.