Narrative intervention has emerged as a promising strategy for violence prevention and reconciliation in contexts of intergroup conflict. In this article, I synthesise the research on fictional nar...

Despite an increase in social psychological research on allyship, less attention has been paid to allyship action in violent intergroup conflict settings. In this contribution, first, we introduce ...

Power and knowledge are intimately tied in Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge (le savoir-pouvoir). Yet people also try to gain and maintain power by engaging in deliberate ignorance. Defined as ...

Ambivalence and dissonance research provides insights into the experiences and consequences of cognitive conflict. Despite the conceptual overlap between both conflicts, they are typically discusse...

The present review introduces the Socioecology of Adult Attachment (SEA) Model which argues that socioecological variation in interdependence is linked to variation in adult attachment processes. E...

It is important to know how helping affects helpers and sustains ongoing helping, for if helping is burdensome and derails further helping, society suffers. We propose the HOPEFUL [Helping Other (G...

Anti-Gypsyism is a deeply entrenched form of ethnic bias in Europe, characterised by realistic conflict perceptions, social norms approving bias, unacknowledged historical victimisation, and denial...

Hope has intrigued and attracted humans for centuries, with views on this emotion ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative. To deepen and nuance our understanding of hope – a seemingly...

When and how should one plan? We estimated the scope (when) of implementation intentions by computing effect sizes for different outcomes, samples, and study characteristics, and tested the compone...

In this paper, we develop a new, integrative, approach to theorising and research in the field of mediated communication (MC): the Social Dynamics Approach (SoDA). It builds on current developments...

Judgements of trustworthiness based on facial features have mainly been investigated by presenting faces in isolation. However, real-life situations often involve contextual cues. Here, we review o...

As nations worldwide diversify, societal institutions are increasingly faced with the challenging task to resolve issues regarding ethnic, cultural, and linguistic matters. In the present contribut...

To understand human prosocial behaviour, one must consider not only the helpers and the requesters, but also the characteristics of the beneficiaries. To this aim, this articles reviews research on...

Very little attention has been paid in the literature to singlehood as an identity. Existing research can be divided into the reasons for singlehood on one side and the implications of being single...

Published in European Review of Social Psychology (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2024)

Even without legal ownership, groups can experience objects, places, and ideas as belonging to them (‘ours’). This state of mind–collective psychological ownership–is understudied in social psychol...

In a meta-analysis of longitudinal analyses of the theory of planned behaviour, we tested a series of extended or auxiliary theory-consistent hypotheses: construct stability, theory predictions wit...

Group members frequently face violations of group-based expectations by in- and outgroup members’ behaviour. Responses to such violations include confronting the violators and escaping from the gro...

Researchers have productively tested identity fusion theory, aiming to explain extreme pro-group orientations. However, the strength of effects, types of measurements, and study contexts have varie...

ABSTRACT System justification theory (SJT) assumes that social identity theory (SIT) cannot fully account for system justification by members of low-status (disadvantaged) groups. Contrary to this claim, we provide several elaborations of SIT that explain when and why members of low-status groups show system justification independent from any separate system justification motive. According to the social

ABSTRACT This article rebuts arguments made by proponents of the Social Identity Model of Social Attitudes (SIMSA), especially the claim that needs for accuracy and a positively distinct social identity are sufficient to explain system justification by members of disadvantaged groups. There are many serious conceptual and empirical problems with SIMSA: (1) It treats system justification as the outcome

ABSTRACT In this article, we reply to Jost et al.'s (Citation2023Jost, J. T., Bertin, J. A., Javeed, A., Liaquat, U., & Rivera-Pichardo, E. J. (2023). Rejoinder to Rubin, Owuamalam, Spears, and Caricati (2023): Ideology is not accuracy; identity is not everything; and the social identity model of social attitudes does not explain system justification, it presupposes it. European Review of Social Psychology

A major theme in social psychological models of collective action is that shared social identity is a critical foundation for resistance and collective action. In this review, we suggest that this ...

This review focuses on resistance to experiences of group-based devaluation, specifically in the context of gender. This literature has seen considerable development in recent years – we outline th...

ABSTRACT A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel applications of social comparisons. Specifically, we

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new model that aims to contribute to the growing literature about the consequences of economic inequality: the economic inequality as normative information ƒmodel (EINIM). In short, we argue that the level of economic inequality works as a cue that people use to infer the normative climate in a given society – for example, the common features that define individuals,

ABSTRACT We review a program of work articulating the concept of inclusion – and approaches for achieving it – for women working in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) organisations. A multi-level framework is described to characterise inclusion in STEM workplaces. This framework is then used to conceptualise a series of empirical studies exploring women’s experiences of STEM work cultures

ABSTRACT In this contribution, we review research that uses a cross-fertilisation approach to integrate developmental and social-psychological perspectives on how identities are formed and changed over time and how identity processes are genuinely social, being embedded in social contexts and fed by social contents. First, we outline the three-factor identity model as a parsimonious approach to understanding

ABSTRACT Living with cultural, religious, and ideological diversity inevitably creates situations where people are confronted with beliefs, values, or practices that they disapprove of. In such situations, people may consider reasons to nevertheless tolerate what they disapprove of (i.e., forbearance tolerance), or reject these (i.e., intolerance). In the current review, we consider empirical research

ABSTRACT Research has investigated conditions which lead to minority members’ wanting to maintain their culture of origin, and to them wanting to adopt the majority culture. Majority members’ ideas for what minority members should do have also received attention. However, past research has developed a blindspot for some important questions: majority and minority members will also have preferences for

ABSTRACT Prejudices tend to come as a package deal; people who are more racist tend to also be more sexist, and so on. Documentations of such attitudinal patterns – generalised prejudice – have a rich history, but the theoretical understanding thereof has been lagging. In recent years, we have seen clear theoretical advancement in the understanding of this phenomenon. We discuss classic premises in

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered and exacerbated psychological distress, and exposed psychological vulnerabilities, in large swathes of the population. Under challenging circumstances, nostalgia may convey tangible psychological and physical health benefits. We review recent evidence for nostalgia’s utility in vulnerable populations, including sojourners and immigrants, civil war refugees

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of the “behavioural immune system” – a suite of psychological mechanisms that complements immunological defences by motivating pre-emptive behavioural responses to infection threats – and summarises research documenting its implications for social attitudes and social behaviour. This summary focuses on four domains of phenomena: interpersonal interactions

ABSTRACT Group norms are necessary for navigating the social world, but they also constrain how we think about individuals. This manuscript progresses in three parts, along the way integrating research from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, as well as the broader social sciences, to present a theoretical perspective on how the tendency to interpret descriptive norms (i.e., what is) as

ABSTRACT Spontaneous (i.e., heuristic, fast, effortless, and associative) processing has clear advantages for human cognition, but it can also elicit undesirable outcomes such as stereotyping and other biases. In the current article, we argue that biased judgements and behaviour that result from spontaneous processing can be reduced by activating various flexibility mindsets. These mindsets are characterised

ABSTRACT Global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the impending climate change require each and every one of us to perform long-term self-restrictive behaviours, implying personal costs, for the sake of vulnerable others and future generations. We argue that empathy – conceptualised as other-oriented moral emotional process – can impact how we think, feel and act towards others in times of

ABSTRACT Although group work has the potential to both reduce and increase the effort expenditure of its members, effort losses (i.e., reduced effort in group- versus individual work) have long been perceived as (nearly) inevitable in Social Psychology. This notion was elicited, accompanied, and bolstered by (i) pessimistic theorising on group productivity, and (ii) the primary use of laboratory experiments

ABSTRACT Outgroup dehumanisation, the denial of full humanity to outgroups relative to ingroups, is pervasive in many contemporary societies. The aim of the present work is to review effective strategies aimed at fostering outgroup humanity attribution. After presenting the main models of humanity attribution, we differentiate two types of strategies. Outgroup-specific strategies are focused on a target

ABSTRACT COVID-19 mitigation strategies have largely relied on persuading populations to adopt behavioural changes, so it is critical to understand how such persuasive efforts can be made more effective. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion allows for the integration of a variety of seemingly disparate effects into one overarching framework. This allows for prediction of which effects

ABSTRACT As economic inequality continues to rise, there is increased concern about both the consequences of inequality and what can be done to reverse this trend. In the present paper, we review the social psychology of economic inequality and redistribution, focusing on their effects on subjective well-being. We address who is affected by inequality and redistribution, what psychological processes

ABSTRACT Objectification refers to the perception and treatment of human beings as mere objects. Although this dehumanizing process has deeply permeated the domain of work throughout history, social psychology researchers have only recently begun to empirically investigate it. Here, we review the recent literature that analysed working objectification by considering its two main facets: objectification

ABSTRACT Many societies today are organised as race-based social hierarchies, with clear boundaries between racial groups at the top versus bottom. The growth of multiracial populations has been heralded as holding the potential to blur existing group boundaries. But whether multiracial people do blur boundaries depends critically on how monoracial perceivers categorise them. We review our research

ABSTRACT Mastering global challenges such as the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic requires implementing effective responses at various social levels. Leadership teams (governmental, industrial) need to integrate available information to introduce effective regulation and update their decisions as new information becomes available. Groups (families, peers, teams) need to act persistently, even when these actions

ABSTRACT There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of misinformation, or “fake news”, into public discourse and politics in many western democracies. Our article first briefly reviews the current state of the literature on conventional countermeasures to misinformation. We then explore proactive measures to prevent misinformation from finding traction in the first place that is based

ABSTRACT In the present work, we review a growing programme of research identifying deficits in race-based interpersonal sensitivity, specifically emotion detection, as a route to creating pitfalls in interracial interactions and generating race-based disparities. Most existing research examining race disparities takes a bias perspective – focusing on how stereotypes and prejudice can make judgements

ABSTRACT An effective response to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is dependent on the public voluntarily adhering to governmental rules and guidelines. How the guidelines are communicated can significantly affect whether people will experience a sense of self-initiation and volition, protecting compliance from eroding. From the perspective of Self-Determination Theory, a broad theory on human motivation

ABSTRACT Modern societies and organisations are becoming increasingly diverse, leading many to argue that diversity should be valued because it can benefit teams, organisations and societies more widely. Considerable attention in both organisational and social psychological research has been devoted to so-called pro-diversity beliefs (i.e. the idea that diversity has an instrumental value to groups)

ABSTRACT We review a 40-year corpus of research that we collectively name “Multiple Categorisation Theory” (MCT). From early illustrations using the minimal group paradigm, through a focus on how people cognitively represent social diversity, to recent models of outgroup “re-humanisation”, this work has revealed much about how we think about inclusivity, exclusion, and intergroup differences. We review

ABSTRACT Boredom is a common, unpleasant emotion that conveys meaninglessness in life and compels people to escape from this adverse existential experience. Within the paradigm of social psychology frameworks, previous research found that bored people endorse cultural sources of meaning as compensation against this state (e.g., nostalgia, political ideologies). In recent years, another form of defence

ABSTRACT The self-regulation strategy of forming implementation intentions has now been studied for almost 30 years. We trace the development of this research and explicate the questions that have been addressed. We then present current research that investigates the consequences of implementation intentions for flexible goal striving, behaviour in situations for which one had not planned, and neuropsychological

ABSTRACT We live in a changing world that can create uncertainty about who we are, and make extremist groups, identities and ideologies attractive to us. This article invokes uncertainty-identity theory to explore the role played by context-induced self-uncertainty in radicalization, violent extremism, and support for populist ideologies and autocratic leadership. Uncertainty-identity theory argues

ABSTRACT We review recent research investigating the effect of shared human values on personal and social outcomes. Using more precise methods than past research, cross-sectional and experimental evidence suggests that well-being and prejudice are predicted by the extent to which people’s values align (or are perceived to align) with those of other people around them. Importantly, this research shows

ABSTRACT We review work from persuasion science relevant to reducing prejudiced attitudes. We begin by introducing the idea that the thoughts people generate – their number and valence – are critical for understanding when responding to persuasive attempts will result in egalitarian attitudes. A focus on thinking highlights the importance of understanding short and long-term attitude change in promoting

ABSTRACT Attitude and belief similarity have long stood as topics of inquiry for social psychology. Recent research suggests that there might be meaningful differences across people in the extent to which they perceive and actually share others’ attitudes and beliefs. I outline research examining the relationship between political ideology and the perception and reality of attitude similarity. Specifically

ABSTRACT Sex is a crucial factor that impacts the quality and stability of relationships, yet many couples report recurrent sexual issues – such as discrepancies in their desired sexual frequency or levels of sexual desire – that detract from their relationship quality. This article describes how applying the theory of communal motivation from relationship science to the sexual domain of relationships

ABSTRACT “Concept creep” is the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. This review presents a synopsis of relevant theoretical advances and empirical research findings on the phenomenon. It addresses three fundamental questions. First, it clarifies the characterisation of concept creep by refining its theoretical and historical

ABSTRACT Building on classic game theory, psychologists have explored the effects of social preferences and expectations on strategic behaviour. Ordinary social perceivers are sensitive to additional contextual factors not addressed by game theory and its recent psychological extensions. We review the results of a research programme exploring how observers judge “players” (i.e., individuals making

ABSTRACT Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a widespread phenomenon. Despite the prevalence of IPV in Western societies, most cases remain unnoticed or at least unreported to authorities. Social psychologists have been investigating bystanders’ reactions to IPV, to understand which factors may influence the willingness to intervene in support of a female victim of violence. We review a research programme

ABSTRACT Many studies have investigated the relationship between ideological attitudes and aggressive tendencies. The present meta-analytic integration of research on this relationship included data of 177 samples (total N = 47,933 participants). The results revealed that this relationship was substantial, r =.31, 95% CI [.27 to.35], p <.001. Such a relationship emerged for both attitudes towards violence

ABSTRACT People use facial information to infer others’ leadership potential across numerous domains; but what forms the basis of these judgements and how much do they matter? Here, we quantitatively reviewed the literature on perceptions of leaders from facial cues to better understand the association between physical appearance and leader outcomes. We used standard random-effects meta-analytic techniques