European Journal of Social Psychology最新文献

Public space is a possible site for grounding a social psychology of citizenship. Locational citizenship speaks to the right to have a place in public space. Certain groups are however often excluded. Drawing on individual interviews and focus group discussions with street children in Gambella Town, Ethiopia, this study explores how street children talk about their lives on the street. The results demonstrate the children's lack of inclusion in locational citizenship, and how public space becomes contested space when different groups use these places in ways that clash. The children also speak to processes of inclusion, both among groups of street children, and kindness from individual adults in their environment. These children's their stories of both exclusion and inclusion are crucial to the developing social psychology of citizenship. The study emphasizes exclusion and inclusion as processes, and the children's active handling of their street life. We also problematizes the division between private and public space when the former is often no longer an available space for these children.

Researchers and philosophers have debated what leads people to judge others as being hypocritical. Some research has shown that perceivers consider targets to be more hypocritical when those targets contradict attitudes that are strongly (e.g., moralized and/or certain) rather than weakly held by the target. In the present work, I attempt to advance this research in several respects. First, I integrate these findings with research on the dimensions of attitude strength (i.e., commitment, embeddedness) to provide a more structured analysis of these claims. I show that characterizing a target's views as embedded and committed has many of the same hypocrisy-related effects as labelling those views as moral, and affect (negative) evaluations of targets through similar mechanisms. However, in Experiment 3, I show that moral attitudes are, nonetheless, perceived as distinct from classic strength dimensions in one crucial respect: the presumption that the target would impose them on other people. Furthermore, whereas judgements of hypocrisy relating to embedded/committed attitudes can be mitigated when perceivers engage in situational attribution, perceivers rendering judgements of hypocrisy relating to moral attitudes resist situational counter-explanations.

When secrets come to mind, do people try to suppress them or do they engage with them? Whereas earlier research suggested that people try to suppress secrets, recent work suggests that people often engage with their secrets. Although thought suppression tends to be associated with greater distress, engagement may be ameliorative. In two longitudinal studies of 653 adults (55% women; M_age = 41.3, SD = 12.4) keeping a secret from their partner, we show that engagement with and suppression of secrets are highly positively related. Like suppression, the more people engage with secrets, the more negative affect and guilt they report feeling. Longitudinal analyses indicate that whereas changes over time in engagement and suppression both predicted reduced secret preoccupation, reductions in suppression (but not engagement) mediated reductions in guilt and negative affect. These results indicate that suppression and engagement are more intimately connected than previously thought. We found no evidence that engagement was ameliorative.

In the attractiveness halo effect, a single known piece of information about a target stimulus (attractiveness of a person) influences assumptions about a host of other attributes about that target (e.g. this person is socially competent or vain). We examined for the first time whether this effect can be updated, that is, whether new information about physical attractiveness (e.g. that someone is not as attractive as initially thought) can undo the effects of earlier information. Across three preregistered experiments (n = 1131), we obtained evidence of a halo-update effect and showed that updating depended on the extent to which personality traits are stereotypically related to attractiveness (i.e. updating was larger for the traits that are typically influenced by attractiveness information). We also explored potential mediators of the halo-update effect. By shedding new light on the malleability of stereotypical attributions, our work has both theoretical and practical implications.

In the present research, we introduce and develop the concept of meta-identification – perceptions of others’ identification with a group – and examine its capacity to shape group life. Across two cross-sectional studies and three experiments (N_total = 3992), we investigate the relationship between participants’ meta-identification in an intragroup context and their group meaningfulness, collective self-efficacy, organisational citizenship behaviour and (perceived and behavioural) performance. Results indicate that perceiving other group members to be highly identified with a group promotes perceptions of group meaningfulness and collective self-efficacy, promotes organisational citizenship behaviour and enhances perceived, and in some contexts actual, group performance. Furthermore, results show that individuals’ meta-identification makes a unique contribution to outcomes above and beyond their social identification. We discuss implications for social identity theorising and the role of meta-identification in supporting meaningful and functional group life.

Research has shown that people frequently fail at exerting self-control. Yet, having good self-control is essential for being trusted and relied on. In this research, I test which common and frequent excuses for self-control failures (i.e., resulting from lack of time vs. money) allow people to maintain an image of good self-control despite failure. In six studies (five pre-registered), using different types of self-control domains, I show that participants perceived someone who failed at a resolution to nevertheless have good self-control if they failed because they lacked money (vs. time) to follow through (Study 1). This effect was due to the mediated (Study 2a) and manipulated (Study 2b) perceived controllability of the excuse. This effect had downstream consequences for participants’ hypothetical and real behaviour toward the individual when their outcomes were interdependent (Studies 3 and 4). Finally, participants lacked insight into these patterns when communicating their own self-control failures, which they attributed to a lack of time over money (Study 5).

Online discussions can fuel perceptions of misalignment, disagreement, conflict or even polarization. In this study, we look at everyday diplomatic expressions that could buffer this. We use automated and manual coding to analyze diplomatic behaviour in online discussions and its consequences for discussion sentiment. We analyze Reddit forums with differing norms: civil (N = 4594 comments), incivil (N = 2126) and social support subreddits (N = 1401). The automated content analysis shows that diplomatic behaviour occurs but does not affect the subsequent discussion. The manual analysis reveals why: discussions consist of disjointed statements rather than dialogue, making diplomacy inconsequential. These results have consequences for the field. First, what appears to be an escalating dialogue might actually be a string of personal attitudes broadcasted in a shared space. Second, the usefulness of automated content analysis in studying interaction dynamics is limited because of difficulties distinguishing broadcasting from dialogue.

Intergroup contact research has rarely considered the intra-individual (within-person) variability of contact. Using a three-wave longitudinal dataset (N = 565), this research aimed to (a) test the within-person simultaneous associations between positive and negative contacts and several intergroup outcomes (i.e. attitudes, prejudice, perceived variability, anxiety, empathy and deprovincialization), while controlling for between-person associations; (b) understand whether and how within-person simultaneous associations are mediated by empathy, anxiety and deprovincialization, and moderated by between-person contact and social dominance orientation (SDO). We found that within- and between-person variations in positive and negative contacts were associated with all intergroup outcomes, except intergroup anxiety for within-person contact. These associations were mainly mediated by the same processes (i.e., empathy and deprovincialization); the associations of within-person variations in contact with intergroup outcomes were largely independent of between-person contact and SDO. Intra-individual contact fluctuations matter for simultaneous prejudice reduction, suggesting the importance of frequent positive contact.

In our multinational study, we tested the hypothesis that belief in a just world (BJW) enhances political trust by strengthening perceptions of political procedural justice. Based on data from the ninth round of the European Social Survey and various country-ranking indices, we found a positive relationship between BJW and political trust, with perceived procedural justice serving as an important mediator in this relationship. More importantly, our multilevel analysis indicated that the actual quality of procedural justice moderates this relationship in a way that BJW enhances perceived procedural justice and political trust indirectly to a greater extent in countries with more severe problems with political procedural justice. The results show that a negative context serves as a catalyzer for motivated perceptions, as BJW pushes perceptions in the direction of justice even more strongly in an unjust context, which, in turn, contributes to gratuitous political trust.

Volunteering can enhance both help-recipients’ and volunteers’ lives, so it is important to explore what motivates people to begin and continue volunteering. For instance, research underpinned by the social identity approach recognises that group-related processes are consequential. Recent quantitative research within this tradition highlighted the potential importance of volunteering as a means of religious identity enactment, but no work has yet explored this idea qualitatively, which means that the richness and complexity of identity enactment as a motive for volunteering remains unexamined. Addressing this, we conducted interviews with volunteers (N = 26) within English religiously motivated voluntary organisations that are responding to an important real-world issue: growing levels of food insecurity. Theoretically guided reflexive thematic analysis developed four themes showing that volunteering can facilitate enactment of different identities (i.e., religious, volunteer and human), thus illustrating the nuanced and complex nature of identity enactment through volunteering. Theoretical and practical implications are explored.