British Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

In two studies (N = 886), we examined how individuals judge and select feedback providers for those who either handle criticism well or poorly after performing a low-quality task. Prosocial liars who provided overly positive feedback, were judged as more moral than honest feedback providers. However, despite this, honest feedback providers were preferred for both oneself and others. Interestingly, when choosing a feedback provider for a vulnerable recipient versus a generic other, participants preferred a prosocial liar in the former case. Similarly, a ‘sensitive’ feedback provider, defined as someone who tells the truth to individuals who handle criticism well but offers overly positive feedback to those who struggle, was also favoured when the recipient was vulnerable compared with when the recipient was unspecified. Notably, the sensitive provider was not judged as less moral than the honest one, suggesting that inconsistent (dis)honesty is tolerated when it aligns with social needs. These findings indicate that individuals strategically adjust preferences for honesty versus lying based on social cues.

Midlife's challenges, changes and demands can create barriers to maintaining group activities, which, for some, include attending in-person group exercise classes. As a potential solution, on-demand group exercise platforms offer agency over participation, anonymity and community interaction. This research explores how social identification processes shape participation within an on-demand group exercise platform. Twenty on-demand group exercise participants aged 40–64 were recruited for three data collection stages: (1) an initial semi-structured interview on exercise history and on-demand usage; (2) a two-week post-exercise diary capturing social identification experiences and (3) a follow-up interview to discuss topics from the first two stages. Results highlight how, through anonymous participation in on-demand group exercise, participants experienced a sense of agency, inclusion and community while feeling socially supported both during and after participation. Findings from this study suggest four factors that can impact social identification within on-demand exercise platforms, namely, (a) creating a collective learning event to foster unity, (b) providing anonymity and agency to enable increased exercise trial, (c) enabling exercise participation from self-excluded groups and (d) amplifying life-stage similarity and support both on-screen and via social media.

This research examines the impact of psychological distance to politics on the formation of conspiracy beliefs. Psychological distance to politics, defined as the perceived separation or detachment from political processes, can lead individuals to view political events and actors with suspicion. Through two cross-sectional studies, with nationally representative samples (Study 1: United States, N = 431; Study 2: United States, N = 300), we find that greater psychological distance to politics predicts belief in specific conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality. In Study 3 (United States, N = 302, pre-registered), we demonstrate that reducing the sense of psychological distance to politics in participants significantly decreases their likelihood of subscribing to conspiratorial explanations. These findings highlight the importance of psychological distance to politics as a predictor of conspiracy beliefs.

Tourism intensification is today a powerful transforming force in many European cities. Supported by new policies, it brings the displacement of long-time residents and influxes of new ones, transforming located relations of urban neighbourhoods and their sociocultural worlds. Contributing to a sociopolitical psychology of place, this study explores how residents in touristified contexts make sense of place and its changes and claim rights for located relations. We conducted a narrative analysis of interviews with residents (n = 30) in two Lisbon neighbourhoods under tourism pressure, exploring how their storied accounts of events-in-time and self-and-other roles and relations construct senses of place and intertwine with claims for place-rights and located relations. Findings reveal three shared, competing narratives, offering different roles to Selves and Others and their relations, some advancing more individual, some more collective rights-claims and relational demands and constructing a different sense of place—rooted, elective and cosmopolitan. The study highlights the value of theoretically grounded narrative analysis for extending a sociopolitical psychology of place. It advances too a better understanding of how sociocultural worlds emerge from the inter-relations of people, place and policy and of the ‘battles of ideas’ over located relations and rights in urban contexts, in particular those affected by tourism.

Social scientists have developed impactful frameworks to understand who unites in protest. Yet, when exceptional circumstances arise, people are sometimes astounded by the convergence of disparate groups protesting together for an apparently unifying cause. One recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic. A new movement protesting the containment measures rapidly evolved, gaining momentum only weeks after the measures' implementation. Strikingly, the movement included participants from, among others, the political far left and right—individuals who had protested each other only weeks earlier and would do so again after the pandemic was declared over. This context enabled a real-life investigation of how people navigated conflicting ideologies to mobilise collectively. Drawing on 11 naturalistic protest observations and template analysis of 30 interviews with 31 protesters, we find that most participants indeed experienced the movement as ideologically diverse. At the same time, protesters used three strategies to navigate ideological conflict: (1) highlighting superordinate identities and ally utility (i.e., usefulness in advancing shared goals); (2) defending allies through in−/out-group biases; and (3) embracing diversity. Our analysis demonstrates the combined explanatory power of social identity, social categorisation, and coalitional psychology frameworks in understanding emerging Querfront alliances, showing how protesters moved from identity construction to coalition calculus.

Public acts of virtue can promote prosocial norms yet are often met with moral scepticism – a phenomenon known as virtue discounting. What psychological processes might underlie people's propensity to both discount others' public virtue and also engage in it themselves? We examine one possible explanation: whether people expect their own public virtuous behaviour to be judged more favourably than others' similar actions. Across four pre-registered studies (N = 2511), we tested for self-serving asymmetries in moral expectations. In three between-subjects experiments, participants either anticipated how others would evaluate their own actions (meta-perceptions) or judged the actions of another person (third-party judgements). Study 1 found no asymmetry in moral goodness. But in Studies 2 and 3, participants expected their own public virtue to be judged as more principled (and more morally good, in Study 2), less reputation-driven, and more trustworthy. Study 3 showed these asymmetries held across multiple perspectives. In contrast, Study 4 used a within-subjects design and found that self-serving asymmetries disappeared when judgements were made side by side. Together, these findings clarify how self-enhancement shapes moral expectations under naturalistic conditions and extend research on moral self-enhancement beyond trait judgements to public virtue and its perceived motivation.

Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this paper examines how members of the Asian category co-construct shared experiences and attributes associated with the category in the U.S. context. Analysing sequences of interaction from podcasts advertised as centring around Asian American experiences, I identify a set of practices recurrently adopted by participants in generalising about commonalities shared by Asian members, which include mitigations, interrogatives, parenthetical inserts and various category-related repair practices. Through a detailed qualitative analysis, I demonstrate the delicate and methodical interactional work done by participants in managing the tension between constructing shared attributes/experiences and acknowledging differences within the Asian category, while also dealing with potential interactional issues associated with generalizing. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how shared meanings associated with social identities are collaboratively negotiated and (re)produced, in addition to offering a detailed account of the practices involved in category-based generalizing in interaction.

When close interpersonal ties involve unethical behaviour, should we report the misconduct? Through four studies, we investigate how social relationships shape moral evaluations of transgression reporting, potential reporters' expectations of evaluators' judgements, and, critically, the alignment between anticipated and actual assessments. We discovered that potential reporters who report (as opposed to those who do not report) transgressors are perceived as more morally upright in their behaviour, more ethical and warmer, regardless of whether the transgressors are close or distant (Study 1). Potential reporters anticipated that reporting (rather than not reporting) transgressors would prompt evaluators to judge them more favourably, irrespective of the relationship's closeness (Study 2). However, reporters expected lower evaluations of morality and warmth when reporting close versus distant transgressors (Study 2). Evaluators' actual evaluations of reporting transgressions proved more favourable than reporters anticipated, particularly concerning behavioural moral rightness, morality and warmth (Study 3). Reporters and evaluators differed in their moral valuations of loyalty versus justice, leading reporters to underestimate the positive impact that reporting close transgressors would have in evaluators' eyes (Study 4). These findings imply that evaluators are more supportive of reporting transgressors than reporters anticipate and that reporters overestimate the social costs associated with such actions.

Guerendiain-Gabás, I., Arnoso-Martínez, M., & Gil de Montes, L. (2025). Bread and Roses: Social re-presentations for Unconditional Basic Income in the Basque Country. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64, e12909. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12909

In our article, we omitted reference to earlier work applying Staerkle's (2009) model of social order to the analysis of social representations of universal basic income. This approach has been previously developed in studies by Dupoirier et al. (2022, 2023).

Dupoirier, S., Demarque, C., Souville, M., Apostolidis, T., & Lampropoulos, D. (2022). The sociorepresentational construction of Universal Basic Income in the French context: Effects of politico-ideological anchors. Papers on Social Representations, 31(1), 1–24.

Dupoirier, S., Demarque, C., Souville, M., Forissier, S., & Lampropoulos, D. (2023). Roles of political orientation and social representations of social order on socio-representational construction towards Universal Basic Income in France. Basic Income Studies, 18(2), 187–213. https://doi.org/10.1515/bis-2022-0014

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