British Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

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

We apologize for this error.

Power, especially in the court system, is a potent determinant of intergroup relationships. Blind justice being only an ideal, public opinion can influence whether harm to low power groups is considered criminal and should be prosecuted. Our experiments investigated the impact of social dominance orientation (SDO) on the perceived appropriateness of punishment for harm to subordinate group members by dominant group members. Further, we examined the moderating role of a remorseful apology. We argue that perpetrators who do not show remorse towards their less powerful victim might be judged less harshly by those scoring high in SDO. Apologizing for the harm indicates a desire for social cohesion, which should appeal more to those low on SDO. We tested our hypothesis across three potential hate crimes: a privacy violation against a gay man (Study 1, N = 87 US-Americans), a shooting of an unarmed Black man (Study 2, N = 91 US-Americans), and an assault against an innocent refugee (Study 3a, N = 179 and 3b, N = 157 Germans). In three of four studies, people who desired group dominance advocated harsher punishment of remorsefully apologizing perpetrators. Our research contributes to the understanding of punitive attitudes across group boundaries with far-reaching societal implications.

The alt-right increasingly claims that White men are becoming targets of discrimination, yet few studies examine how, and for whom, perceived (reverse) discrimination manifests among White men. We address this oversight by examining rates of change in perceptions of ethnic and gender discrimination across 10 annual waves of a nationwide sample of White men (2014 to 2023; N = 20,486). Latent class growth analysis revealed that most White men (82.75% of participants) reported low and stable perceptions of discrimination over time, alleviating concerns of widespread discontent. However, we identified a Disenfranchised class (8.49%) that perceived moderate discrimination and a Radicalized class (8.76%) whose initially low levels of perceived discrimination increased markedly over time. These classes differed across socio-demographic variables, socio-political attitudes and well-being measures. We thus identify how, and for whom, perceptions of discrimination change over time among White men and how these changes undermine health and progressive social change.

Relative deprivation theory argues that individuals can perceive themselves to be deprived relative to other individuals (IRD) or that their ingroup is deprived relative to other groups (GRD). Few studies, however, investigate how these distinct ‘types’ of relative deprivation manifest over time. We address this oversight using multi-trajectory latent class growth analysis to identify distinct growth trajectories of relative deprivation across 13 annual waves of a nationwide longitudinal panel study (2011–2023; N_total = 75,073). We identified two discrete classes: the Content class (90.5% of the sample) and the Deprived class (9.5%). Whereas the Content class had low levels of IRD and GRD that declined over 12 years, the Deprived class had moderate levels of IRD that decreased but high levels of GRD that increased over time. Membership in these two classes differed across demographics, well-being and sociopolitical measures. The implications for relative deprivation theory are discussed.

Anticipating, considering and incorporating possible futures are central components of human social life. Our social actions, beliefs, values and interactions are all oriented towards, or away from, various future outcomes. Yet despite this, social psychology is yet to harness its unique contribution to our understanding of the future, not addressing the challenges that many other disciplines are confronting in this emerging discipline. In this editorial, we introduce our special issue on ‘futures social psychology’, and in doing so, we provide a starting point for scholars interested in furthering research in this area. We outline previous important discipline-specific and methodological contributions, connecting social psychological perspectives to the wider academic and practitioner landscape. We outline how our eleven special issue contributions advance discussion, theorizing and research methodology on topics such as sustainability, collective group continuity, prefigurative politics, AI sentience and degrowth policies. Finally, we encourage social psychologists of all topic and methodological persuasions to adopt a generative, prospective and possibilities-focussed approach to their work, to ensure that social psychology as a discipline can effectively meet the challenges of the future and maximize its impact.

This research investigates whether and how workplace diversity approaches—identity-conscious versus identity-blind—are associated with LGBTQ+ employees' perceptions of tolerance. Whilst tolerance is widely regarded as an important virtue for the harmonious functioning of diverse societies, it can inadvertently harm minoritized individuals. In workplace settings, perceptions of tolerance may hinder the benefits of diversity by discouraging minoritized employees from sharing their perspectives and prompting individuals with relatively concealable stigmas, such as LGBTQ+ employees, to conceal their identities. Across two studies (n = 907), we examine the conditions under which tolerance perceptions may arise. Study 1 explores LGBTQ+ prospective employees' anticipated tolerance in organizations with identity-blind versus identity-conscious mission statements. Study 2 examines LGBTQ+ employees' workplace experiences, focussing on how organizational and leadership diversity approaches are related to perceptions of tolerance. Findings reveal that relatively identity-blind approaches are associated with increased feelings of being tolerated. Moreover, identity-conscious leadership strategies, when coupled with identity-conscious organizational approaches, further diminish perceptions of being merely tolerated. Our findings underscore an un-intended correlate of identity-blind diversity approaches, which may perpetuate tolerance-focussed climates and indirectly undermine inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees.