Publications by authors named "Sven Waldzus"

Article Synopsis
  • Humans are inherently social, but the level of social mindfulness—being aware of and considerate towards others—varies among individuals and countries.
  • A study involving 8,354 participants from 31 industrialized nations revealed significant differences in social mindfulness, linking it closely to countries' performance in environmental protection.
  • The research emphasizes the importance of small acts of kindness and attention in fostering everyday cooperation rather than focusing solely on material contributions.
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Two experiments tested whether group members' reparation intentions towards victims of the ingroup's past wrongdoings depend on their experience of relative status change. We manipulated born-free White South Africans' experience of accessibility of memories of past ingroup wrongdoings and their current experiences of status loss. For participants believing in the ingroup's responsibility for past wrongdoing towards Black South Africans during Apartheid, status-loss experiences reduced reparation intentions prompted by the experience of memorizing examples of such wrongdoing as easy (Experiment 1, N = 193), and the ease to remember wrongdoing examples increased reparation intentions only if participants were reminded of status stability, but not if they were reminded of status loss (Experiment, N = 126).

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We investigated, by means of the Reverse Correlation Task (RCT), visual representations of the culturally dominating group of local people held by sojourners as a function of their degree of cross-cultural adaptation. In three studies, using three different methods (reduced RCT, full RCT, conceptual replication) with three independent samples of sojourners and seven independent samples of Portuguese and US-American raters, we gathered clear evidence that poor adaptation goes along with more negative representations of locals. This indicates that sojourner adaptation is reflected, at a social-cognitive level, in the valence of outgroup representations.

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Intergroup changes occur often between subgroups who are asymmetric in status (e.g., size, power, prestige), with important consequences for social identification, especially among the members of lower-status groups.

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This research investigated the influence of observed touch on the perceptions of communality and dominance in dyadic interactions. We manipulated four key situational features of haptic behavior in two experiments: the initiation, reciprocity, the degree of formality of touch (Studies 1 and 2), and the context of the interaction (Study 2). The results showed that the default perception of touch, irrespective of whether it is initiated or reciprocated, is the communal intention of the toucher.

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Merger announcements cause stress among employees, often leading to low change commitment, especially among employees from the lower-status merger partner. Such stress influences how deeply employees process merger-relevant information. Previous research examined how merger patterns that preserve versus change status differences impact merger support, but did not address how employees' information processing may influence this relationship.

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Based on the premise that groups' social standing and regard depend on their prototypicality for superordinate categories, minorities can be understood to suffer from the fact that they are considered as less prototypical than majorities. Previous research has shown that complex (vs. simple) representations of superordinate categories can reduce majority members' tendency to perceive their in-group as more prototypical than the out-group.

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The target article diagnoses a dominance of liberal viewpoints with little evidence, promotes a conservative viewpoint without defining it, and wrongly projects the U.S. liberal-conservative spectrum to the whole field of social psychology.

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The focus on negative attitudes toward other groups has led to a dichotomy between the prejudice reduction and the collective action approach. To solve the resulting problems identified by Dixon et al., we suggest analyzing the psychological processes underlying the construction of relationships (and their alternatives) between own and other groups.

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To explain the determinants of negative behavior toward deviants (e.g., punishment), this article examines how people evaluate others on the basis of two types of standards: minimal and maximal.

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The in-group projection model hypothesizes that members of social groups generalize attributes of their in-group to a superordinate category that provides dimensions for comparisons between in-group and out-group (in-group projection). As a result, both groups in an intergroup situation should disagree about their relative prototypicality for the superordinate category. Three studies confirmed this prediction.

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In an approach to intergroup discrimination and tolerance, it is assumed that the outgroup's difference from the ingroup is evaluated with reference to the prototype of the higher-order category that includes both groups. Two correlational studies yielded evidence that (a) group members tend to perceive their ingroup as relatively prototypical for the inclusive category (projection), (b) members highly identified with both ingroup and inclusive category (dual identity) tend to project most, and (c) relative prototypicality is related to negative attitudes toward the outgroup. The latter relation was further specified in Study 3, manipulating the valence of the inclusive category.

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