Nichole Argo

Dr. Nichole Argo is a social psychologist who works at the intersection of science and practice. She is currently the Founder and Director of Research at the TogetherUp Institute, a consulting firm that leverages the science of social and behavioral psychology to support nonprofits, philanthropy, municipalities, and private companies with research, diagnostic tools, design strategies, and impact frameworks for building cultures of belonging and innovative local models of democracy. As part of a 2022-2025 bridge building/democracy innovation pilot, she co-directs a diverse leaders assembly, the Needham Resilience Network, designed to bridge silos, tool leaders in skills to communicate across difference, and co-create solutions to local problems.

Dr. Argo has recently authored: The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in the US, The Science of Polarization and Insights for Bridge Building, and several essays on how to communicate across differences in the midst of sacred values. She is published in leading political science and psychology journals and appears occasionally on major radio and TV networks.

Previously, Dr. Nichole Argo was a Social Psychologist in the Departments of Engineering and Public Policy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where she used experimentation, surveys, and mental model methodologies to understand the role of emotion and cognition in decision making about value laden issues, and intergroup conflict and cooperation.

Argo spent several years doing field work on political violence. She is one of the few experts on terrorism and political violence to have interviewed and lived with militants, and was one of the first to provide data to refute the “religion, poverty, or indoctrination” theories of terrorist motivation in 2003.

Argo interviewed militants and bombers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and Leeds (United Kingdom). In order to understand their lives, she lived amidst their communities. While living in Jerusalem, she interviewed twelve captured Palestinian bombers and three who were still at large. She then moved to the extremist West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin, where she lived with and interviewed Israeli settlers surrounding the plot to blow up an Arab Girls’ School in East Jerusalem. Between 2004-2007, Argo lived in the West Bank and Gaza, where she conducted ethnographic studies of over fifty families of successful Palestinian bombers, and interviewed countless Palestinian “senders” and militants. To better understand what about radicalization was unique to the Palestinian case and what was generalizable, she took her study to Leeds and London to interview the London 7/7 bombers', families, friends and community members along with the members and neighbors of the Finsbury Park Mosque.

Since returning home, Argo has consulted with governments and think tanks. She co-directed “The Project on Radicalization: A Neuroscientific Approach” with Special Forces Brigadier General Russell Howard at the Center for Counterterrorism at Tufts University, and has made guest appearances on Chicago National Public Radio and Fox News. She has presented her work at Harvard University, University of Chicago, and Stanford, among other Universities.

Argo holds degrees from Stanford, MIT, and the New School for Social Research.