European Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

School disciplinary sanctions increase sharply during adolescence, with students from certain backgrounds disproportionately affected. Strong teacher–student relationships that cultivate trust, respect and empathy may be essential to buffer against these changes. This quasi-experimental longitudinal field study trialled a brief empathic mindset intervention with teachers in English secondary schools and examined its effect on their students’ (N = 1347) behaviour records and perceptions of schooling. The intervention was associated with a greater sense of school belonging and a reduction in sanctions (particularly for boys), thereby signalling the importance of making students feel heard and respected.

Practices of bribery in the delivery of public services become entrenched when they are driven by social norms of reciprocity. The resulting economies of favours, which are common across diverse geographical regions, are resilient to conventional anti-corruption measures because they are underpinned by strong social pressures. This article describes the results of a behaviour change intervention to address gift-giving as a form of bribery in a Tanzanian hospital. The intervention utilised environmental cues and a peer-led network approach to deliver messages aimed at disincentivising bribery. An exit survey of hospital users indicates a reduction of the ‘gift-offering propensity score’, capturing self-declared behaviour, from 23% before implementation of the intervention to 13% afterwards. We find similar changes in the enabling norms score. Semi-structured interviews with hospital users and health workers further support these findings. These results suggest that practices and norms around bribery might be changed through a multi-pronged approach that addresses both the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ side of bribery.

This article is a qualitative study of the relationship between social norms and corrupt behaviour in the Ghana Police Service. Although there is a growing body of literature exploring this nexus in very different settings, relatively less attention has been given to understanding the extent of the normative influence of social norms over corrupt behaviour. Social norms do not operate in a vacuum; therefore, to better understand their normative influence, it is critical to have analytical clarity of the broader social, economic and political settings in which they unfold. In order to so, this article deploys and adapts a set of analytical tools developed by Ben Cislaghi and Lori Heise, namely, the ‘dynamic framework for social change’ and the ‘theory of normative spectrum’ to map the different factors shaping corrupt behaviour and their interaction with relevant social norms. The data used for this analysis consist in 43 in person interviews with police officers and other anti-corruption stakeholders, collected in different rounds using semi-structured interviews and textual vignettes as eliciting tools. The findings of this research suggest that behavioural elements of sociality appear to be regulated by different enabling factors, which can impact the salience of the norm at play.

Women's bodies have long been subject to societal control. We examine a form of gender/sex bias that may be used to justify and maintain such control: the moralization of women's bodies. Across two studies with US samples (total N = 805), we show that people draw more strongly on morality when justifying their views about women's (vs. men's) autonomy over their bodies. Study 1 showed that a wide range of body-related behaviours were seen as more of a moral issue for women than for men—a pattern that was absent for behaviours unrelated to bodily autonomy. Study 2 focused on a context with more opposition to women's bodily autonomy (public toplessness) and showed that people drew more strongly on morality when justifying their opposition to women's, compared to men's, bodily autonomy. Exploratory analyses suggested that sexist beliefs may play an important role in such gendered moralization.

Relational and societal exclusion of immigrants in Western countries fuels negative perceptions of immigrants among non-migrants. We investigated how relational and societal inclusion in the form of friendship and immigrant integration policies jointly relate to perceptions of immigrants. We conducted a longitudinal multilevel analysis drawing on probability samples of non-migrants from the Transatlantic Trends Survey (N = 27,513) in nine North American and European countries over 5 years. Extending prior scholarship, we provide longitudinal evidence that more inclusive immigrant integration policies correspond to greater numbers of immigrant friends. Greater friendships with immigrants, in turn, corresponded to more positive perceptions of immigrants. Furthermore, we found that exclusive policies predict negative perceptions of immigrants but only among non-migrants who have few immigrant friends. Instead, when non-migrants report more immigrant friends, their perceptions of immigrants are positive regardless of policies. Thus, societal inclusion is related to stronger relational inclusion, but once intergroup friendships are established, societal exclusion is less consequential.

Extant research on corruption has uncovered the important role of norms. Yet, little is known about how people view specific acts of corruption in countries that differ in the prevalence of corruption. The present research examines moral judgements of four different types of corrupt acts in a high- versus low-corruption country, thereby providing a critical test of two opposing hypotheses. The descriptive norms approach predicts that citizens of a high-corruption country will be morally more lenient than citizens of a low-corruption country. The relative deprivation approach predicts the opposite, that citizens of a high-corruption country will morally condemn corrupt acts stronger than citizens of a low-corruption country. Drawing samples from the Netherlands and Indonesia (a low- vs. high-corruption country), two experiments (total N = 477) show that Dutch participants are often more morally permissive towards corruption than Indonesians, although specific results varied for the four types of corruption. This largely supported the relative deprivation approach. In addition, Indonesian participants expressed more disappointment and anger towards corruption than Dutch participants. This research suggests that feeling deprived through regular corruption experiences leads people to condemn corrupt acts more strongly.