Pers Soc Psychol Bull
January 2024
The experience of privilege can trigger psychological conflict among advantaged group members. Nonetheless, little work has explored strategies that advantaged group members use to manage their identities as privileged actors. Building on Knowles et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat shapes our emotional responses to socio-political events? Following the social identity approach, we suggest that individuals adjust their emotional responses to socio-political stimuli based on their ideological out-group's responses, in a manner that preserves the comparative and normative fit of ideological in-group-out-group categories. In Study 1 and Study 2 (pre-registered), Jewish-Israeli leftists and rightists were exposed to their ideological out-group's alleged emotional response to a stimulus associated with Israeli-Palestinian relations, which was either stereotypical (leftists expressing low anger and rightists expressing high anger) or non-stereotypical (leftists expressing high anger and rightists expressing low anger). Across studies, participants reported more positive affect towards their ideological out-group when its response to the stimulus was non-stereotypical versus stereotypical, yet their own response to the stimulus became more "extreme" (towards the low end of the anger scale for leftists, and towards the high end of the anger scale for rightists), shifting farther away from their ideological out-group norm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAround the world, people engage in social protests aimed at addressing major societal problems. Certain protests have led to significant progress, yet other protests have resulted in little demonstrable change. We introduce a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected; and (iii) what outcomes are being evaluated? We then review relevant research to suggest how the framework can help synthesize conflicting findings in the literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDecades of research in social identity have shown that people instinctively hold positive attitudes towards ingroup members and negative attitudes towards outgroup members. However, it remains unclear how people respond to individuals explicitly identified with both one's ingroup and outgroup. We propose that when people are exposed to dual-identified individuals and groups (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEveryday expression of prejudice continues to pose a social challenge across societies. We tend to assume that to the extent people are egalitarian, they are more likely to confront prejudice-but this might not necessarily be the case. We tested this assumption in two countries (US and Hungary) among majority members of society, using a behavioral paradigm for measuring confronting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBr J Soc Psychol
October 2023
Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, above and beyond other prescribed gender norms. Across five experiments (N = 738), we predicted and found that voluntarily childless women elicit more negative reactions than mothers, and importantly, also more than women violating other gender norms in the realm of occupation (Study 1), power (Study 2) or sexual orientation (Study 3).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSignificanceThe effects of recent protests for racial equality, particularly when they included violence, are currently of public and academic interest. To better understand these effects, we combine a dataset of all 2020 BlackLivesMatter protests with survey data containing measures of prejudice and support for police reform. Protests were not associated with reductions in prejudice, but were associated with increases in support for police reform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined the role that witnesses play in triggering humiliation. We hypothesized that witnesses trigger humiliation because they intensify the two core appraisals underlying humiliation: unfairness and internalization of a devaluation of the self. However, we further propose that witnesses are not a defining characteristic of humiliating situations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
April 2021
Gender inequality is one of the most pressing issues of our time. A core factor that feeds gender inequality is people's gender ideology-a set of beliefs about the proper order of society in terms of the roles women and men should fill. We argue that gender ideology is shaped, in large parts, by the way people make sense of gender differences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile we have a rich understanding of the motivations of disadvantaged group members to act collectively with their group, especially the important role played by identification, we know less about the disadvantaged's motivations to engage in joint action with the advantaged. This research examines the role of identification in predicting joint and ingroup collective action in intergroup conflicts. Since joint action inherently diffuses the perception of "us versus them", we propose that identification predicts ingroup action, but not joint action.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCollective action research tends to focus on motivations of the disadvantaged group, rather than on which tactics are effective at driving the advantaged group to make concessions to the disadvantaged. We focused on the potential of nonnormative nonviolent action as a tactic to generate support for concessions among advantaged group members who are resistant to social change. We propose that this tactic, relative to normative nonviolent and to violent action, is particularly effective because it reflects constructive disruption: a delicate balance between disruption (which can put pressure on the advantaged group to respond) and perceived constructive intentions (which can help ensure that the response to action is a conciliatory one).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMoral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPathogens represent a significant threat to human health leading to the emergence of strategies designed to help manage their negative impact. We examined how spiritual beliefs developed to explain and predict the devastating effects of pathogens and spread of infectious disease. Analysis of existing data in studies 1 and 2 suggests that moral vitalism (beliefs about spiritual forces of evil) is higher in geographical regions characterized by historical higher levels of pathogens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
January 2020
We propose that because members of discriminated (vs. advantaged) groups have a history of dealing with injustice, majority group members expect them to be more committed to social justice. By commitment to social justice, we mean supporting, and caring for, the basic rights of virtually any marginalized group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup's perspective. Research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants' perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speaker. The credibility makes it possible for the speaker to be viewed as open-minded, which subsequently inspires greater hope.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHope is viewed as a positive emotion associated with the motivation to change existing conditions. As such, it is highly relevant for social change, particularly when considering disadvantaged groups. We propose that, in the context of unequal intergroup relations, hope may actually undermine motivation for change among disadvantaged group members.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
November 2018
When transgressions are committed by a group, those highly identified with the group are often least likely to recognize the transgressions, feel collective guilt, and engage in action to address them. We hypothesized that especially among high identifiers, demonstrating that in-group transgressions threaten the group's image can induce normative conflict and thus collective guilt and action. In the first study, we demonstrate that high (vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe bias against women in academia is a documented phenomenon that has had detrimental consequences, not only for women, but also for the quality of science. First, gender bias in academia affects female scientists, resulting in their underrepresentation in academic institutions, particularly in higher ranks. The second type of gender bias in science relates to some findings applying only to male participants, which produces biased knowledge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBisexuals are an invisible sexual minority. However, at the same time, bisexuals are stereotypically associated with confusion and promiscuity. Stereotype learning theories suggest that individuals who are unfamiliar with a social group are less likely to have stereotypical beliefs about its members.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch suggests that hearing an outgroup member voice internal criticism increases individuals' openness to the outgroup's perspective. We replicate and extend these findings in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli participants exposed to a Palestinian official voicing internal criticism reported more openness to the Palestinian narrative of the conflict, an effect that was mediated by an increase in participants' perception that Palestinians are open-minded and a subsequent increase in their hope for more positive relations between the two groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe modern era of globalization has been accompanied by a massive growth in interconnections between groups, and has led to the sharing of multiple identities by individuals and groups. Following these developments, research has focused on the issue of multiple identities, and has shed important light on how who hold these complex forms of identity feel and behave, and on the reactions they elicit from members of other groups. However, the potential of with such multiple identities (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExistential threat lies at the heart of intergroup conflict, but the literature on existential concerns lacks clear conceptualization and integration. To address this problem, we offer a new conceptualization and measurement of existential threat. We establish the reliability and validity of our measure, and to illustrate its utility, we examine whether different existential threats underlie the association between political ideology and support for specific political policies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch on intergroup emotions has largely focused on the experience of emotions and surprisingly little attention has been given to the expression of emotions. Drawing on the social-functional approach to emotions, we argue that in the context of intergroup conflicts, outgroup members' expression of disappointment with one's ingroup induces the complementary emotion of collective guilt and correspondingly a collective action protesting ingroup actions against the outgroup. In Study 1 conducted immediately after the 2014 Gaza war, Jewish-Israeli participants received information about outgroup's (Palestinians) expression of emotions (disappointment, fear, or none).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
July 2015
Despite growing attention the study of humiliation is receiving, there is little consensus as to how humiliation differs from other related emotions. We here argue that humiliation shares central characteristics with anger, shame, and embarrassment, but also differs from these emotions in meaningful ways. In Study 1, participants read about a professor who demeaned a student's work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExtensive research has established the pivotal role that group-based emotions play in shaping intergroup processes. The underlying implicit assumption in previous work has been that these emotions reflect what the rest of the group feels (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF