European Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

In conflict-affected societies, collective victimization can undermine social cohesion or foster narrow ingroup bonding and parochialism. We examine whether the possibility to know and freely communicate about diverse conflict experiences, which go beyond collective (ingroup) victimhood, can serve as a resource for community cohesion (i.e., community attachment and efficacy). Nationally representative surveys from two conflict-ridden societies, Sri Lanka (N = 1188) and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (N = 1000), reveal that individuals with broader knowledge of diverse conflict experiences exhibit stronger attachment to their local communities and perceive them as more efficacious, but only when they believe knowledge of these experiences can be shared within their community. Conversely, diverse conflict knowledge is related to a lower sense of community cohesion when individuals perceive diverse conflict experiences as unspeakable in their community. The findings contribute to our understanding of the potential effects of violent conflict on social cohesion and highlight the importance of openness to discuss the full range of conflict experiences.

Complex system models of attitudes, such as the Hierarchical Ising Opinion Model (HIOM), suggest that a person's involvement in an attitude object could be linked to attitude extremity and polarization. Despite its potential to integrate various theories of attitude change and despite the implications it could hold for attitude research, this assumption has not yet been studied systematically. We investigate the role of involvement in five large-scale, representative surveys on general political orientation and attitudes towards the EU and COVID-19 vaccines, conducted in 79 different countries over the last 8 years. We propose criteria to classify the degree of ideological divergence and introduce a modality detection measure suited for ordinal data and large sample sizes. We find that involvement is linked to attitude extremity and that predictions of HIOM are validated in a topic-specific dataset on COVID-19 vaccines. Results on political orientation and general attitudes towards the EU show either no effect of involvement or patterns that contradict HIOM's predictions. We discuss implications for the measurement of involvement, complex system models of attitudes and polarization research.

We examine how social identity processes shape condoning of organisational corruption among onlookers. Two studies examined the willingness of outside observers to condone, or else condemn, corrupt actions of real organisations, a process we call ‘engaged onlookership’ building on the social identity approach to engaged followership. In both Study 1 (cross-sectional) and Study 2 (experimental), we found that identification with a company guilty of malfeasance and identification with the monitoring agency who uncovered their scandal independently predicted opposing effects on condoning corruption, even while controlling for moral identity and demographic factors. These findings were then replicated and extended in Study 3 that made several methodological improvements upon previous studies. Results provided additional evidence of an indirect effect of the manipulation on condoning corruption through company identification. These findings provide support for an engaged onlookership model of corruption which posits that onlookers are more likely to endorse morally problematic behaviour when they believe it is performed by, and in the interests of, an organisation with which they identify.

The present research investigated whether a normative outgroup apology enhances conciliatory attitudes (i.e., willingness for intergroup contact and feelings of peace) and intergroup negotiations while reducing competitive victimhood. In three experiments (N = 855) conducted in the post-conflict context of Kosovo, we manipulated the normative apology by informing participants that the majority of outgroup members (i.e., Serbs) apologized for the Kosovo war. We compared this normative apology condition with an institutional apology, in which a Serbian representative apologized for the Kosovo war on behalf of the Serbian government (in all experiments), and a control (i.e., baseline) condition in which no apology-related information was presented (Experiments 1 and 2). Overall, the results showed that participants in the normative apology condition reported greater willingness for contact with outgroup members, increased feelings of peace, greater support for intergroup negotiations, and reduced competitive victimhood compared to participants in other conditions. In addition, Experiment 3 revealed that outgroup humanization mediated the effect of normative apology on conciliatory attitudes, intergroup negotiations and competitive victimhood. In sum, these findings showed that normative apologies play a critical role in improving intergroup relations and reducing conflict-related tensions.

Research highlights the long-term collective effects of mass human rights violations (MHRVs) on survivors’ wellbeing. This multi-method, multi-context paper combines the social identity approach (SIA), transitional and social justice theories and human rights-conceptualised wellbeing to propose a human rights understanding of trauma responses and experiences in the context of MHRVs. In Study 1, ethnographic research in four locations in Kosova, 5 years post war indicates that lack of perceived conflict-related and social justice is experienced as a key contributor to survivors’ individual and collective wellbeing. In Study 2, 61 semi-structured interviews with MHRVs survivors from post-war Kosova, post-conflict Northern Ireland and post-dictatorship Albania two to three decades post conflict also show that such justice experiences inform wellbeing. These studies illustrate the importance of expanding the SIA to health and trauma theories by taking account of a human rights-conceptualised wellbeing as well as adopting a holistic analysis of justice perception.