European Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

Transitional justice jurisdictions aim to promote reconciliation. Although previous research focuses on truth commissions, the reconciliatory role of redistributive justice is less clear. This article investigated the association of conditional cash transfers and victims’ reparation with demand for redistribution, belief in forgiveness, support for the peace process and community participation in Colombia. We analysed three nationally representative samples of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) surveys in 2011 (Study 1; n = 1503), 2016 (Study 2; n = 1563) and 2018 (Study 3; n = 1663). Consistently across studies, conditional cash transfers (and not victim reparation programs) predicted higher community participation, with little effect on other reconciliation indicators. Further, redistribution is indirectly associated with other reconciliation indicators through community participation, supporting the observation that transitional justice relates to reconciliation when it satisfies a need for agency and empowerment. We discuss how the null effects of the victim reparation program suggesting context-specific constraints.

Although the importance of temporal perspectives for understanding collective movements has been theoretically emphasised, they are rarely considered in research. Focusing on the mass protests against COVID-19 policies in Germany, we investigated how protesters make use of temporal references in their protest narratives. Results from 11 multi-site protest observations and 31 interviews showed that participants (a) drew historical perpetrator and victim analogies and imagined a dystopian future, bolstering perceptions of injustice, (b) drew on resistance narratives and imagined the ideal, utopian future society, increasing their perceived efficacy and (c) countered feelings of insignificance by identifying with past heroes. Protesters living in the East of Germany drew comparatively more resistance analogies than those living in the West, who often likened those complying with the COVID-19 policies to the perpetrators of the past national-socialist and communist dictatorships. The findings empirically underline the importance of integrating historical–cultural–future perspectives into models of collective action.

Over the past 50 years, many studies have investigated the impact of teacher expectations on student achievement and indicated small to moderate effects. Currently, it is still unclear which student-related factors (e.g. socioeconomic status, or gender) moderate the expectation effect. There is still a need to gain a better understanding of the relation between teacher expectations and students' characteristics. The present study aims to examine the accuracy of teacher expectations as well as student-related moderators of the expectation effects on students' achievement. The analyses are based on data from a longitudinal study including 28 primary school teachers and their students (N = 509). The results show that high expectations of teachers correlated positively with student achievement in mathematics, although no significant moderating effects were found. These findings strengthen the importance of ensuring high teacher expectations for all students.

We explored the impact of mood on the judgemental consequences of word pronounceability in six Experiments (1 preregistered, total N = 1183). Positive and negative mood was induced via video clips (all but Experiment 4) and subliminal affective primes (Experiment 4). Additionally, participants were presented with easy- and difficult-to-pronounce letter strings. These were framed as target words to be judged for liking (Experiments 1–2), as names of eBay sellers to be judged for trustworthiness (Experiments 3–5), or as either seller names or passwords to provoke opposing interpretations of pronunciation fluency (Experiment 6). While pronounceability showed a robust effect across experiments, mood did not modulate the judgemental use of (Experiments 1–4), the correction for (Experiment 5) and the interpretation (Experiment 6) of word pronounceability. In conclusion, the judgemental effects of pronounceability persist despite the presence of more objective and task-pertinent cues, resist judgemental correction and remain unaffected by affective states.

The actor–observer difference describes the tendency to explain own actions with variable and external aspects, but others’ actions with stable and internal characteristics. We test two opposing predictions of how changes in attribution vary as a function of being ignored and excluded. On the one hand, individuals may cope by psychologically distancing themselves from sources of exclusion, potentially producing stable and internal representations of them. On the other hand, excluded individuals are particularly sensitive to social cues, which may foster a more variable and externally motivated representation of sources’ behaviours. Consistent with the first prediction, excluded (vs. included) individuals (total N = 1,052 in four studies) perceived causes for negative hypothetical outcomes as more internal and, to a somewhat lesser extent, more stable for others involved in the interaction. The use of different methodological approaches across studies attests to this conclusion's robustness and addresses alternative explanations.

Poverty remains a pressing problem, with social support playing a crucial role in its reduction. Drawing on previous research on health-related mindsets, we propose that a growth mindset of poverty – that is, believing poverty can be changed – can have both positive and negative effects on helping intentions through increased outcome expectancy and blame, respectively. In three experiments, we found that a growth mindset of poverty is associated with increased outcome expectancy and blame, which, in parallel, mediate the relationship between mindsets and helping intentions. However, these contrary indirect effects negate each other, yielding a total null effect. Further, manipulating the relationship between mindset and outcome expectancy (but not blame) alters the relationship between mindset and helping intentions (Studies 2 and 3). By shedding light on the circumstances under which mindsets of poverty can diminish or amplify helping intentions, our research offers valuable insights for practitioners and charities dedicated to combating poverty.

Support for children's rights is greater among children raised in democratic environments. The present two studies examined children's endorsements and predictors of children's rights. Five democratic competences taken from the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture served as predictors. We tested the models in a sample of children raised in five European countries and a sample raised in an African country, seeking to extend our model beyond the Global North. In Study 1, we found four of these five competences, namely, higher valuing of cultural diversity, civic-mindedness, cultural openness and empathy significantly predicted higher endorsements of rights in children from Bulgaria, Italy, Norway, Romania and Spain (7–11-year-olds; N = 292). In Study 2, we found higher valuing of cultural diversity significantly predicted higher endorsements of rights in Nigerian children (7–14-year-olds; N = 84). Supporting Social Cognitive Domain Theory, children in both studies endorsed nurturance rights more than self-determination rights. Inclusion of children from the Global North and South enabled us to determine whether patterns of rights endorsements were similar for children from both samples. Overall, this research presents novel findings on the salience of valuing cultural diversity in support for children's rights.

This research examines the public discussion around animal production in Finland. Applying a dialogical approach to social representations theory, we elucidate the hotly debated nature of animal production by analysing news articles (N = 50) and the related reader-produced comments (N = 1501) in Finnish newspapers. We employed qualitative methods for analysing multivoicedness and dialogue to identify ego–alter pairs constructed in the material in relation to the object of animal production. Four prevalent ego–alter pairs were identified: advocates for animal rights–animal production defenders, producers–consumers, orthodox–unorthodox Christians and provincials–urban dwellers. The study contributes to the study of everyday knowledge by showing how various contradictory understandings of the same topic are generated in public discourse. The research also demonstrates how the theoretical concept of ego–alter embedded in the social representations theory can be empirically utilised in analysing debates in contemporary media environments and to shed light on the dialogical dynamics around the discussions.

This research examined whether female (vs. male) leaders are preferred during a pandemic when stereotypically feminine leadership is deemed useful. We hypothesized that citizens prefer female (vs. male) politicians when the crisis is framed as a social (vs. economic) crisis because they believe it requires feminine (vs. masculine) leadership. In a pilot study and three online experiments with US residents (N_total = 1675), we manipulated crisis type or a leadership candidate's gender for a task force. While participants indicated that a crisis framed as social (vs. economic) required more feminine leadership, they did not appoint a woman more or rated her as more suitable for the social crisis (vs. economic crisis or a no-crisis situation). Furthermore, the female (vs. male) candidate was not perceived to possess more feminine leadership traits. Overall, participants did not rely on gender stereotypes when explicitly evaluating politicians. We discuss potential explanations for these unexpected results.