Social Psychological Perspective Research Articles

A review of the literature on factors affecting organizational engagement of Millennials: Social identity and psychological entitlement perspectives

Organizational engagement has only recently gained traction in research literature despite engagement being considered as a multidimensional construct encompassing engagement with the work, job or the organization. Organizational engagement of Millennials is crucial for organizational success today given that Millennials are the largest generational cohort in contemporary workforces and they are expected to lead the transformation of organizations at the onset of Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. Novel theoretical approaches that are applied in the case of employee or work engagement, such as the social identity perspective, appear to have been ignored in the case of organizational engagement. This article aims to present a narrative review of extant research literature on organizational engagement of Millennials relating to the theories and frameworks of engagement, and thereby to identify knowledge gaps and recommend future research directions and theoretical perspectives that may help fill these gaps. The literature review was conducted using Google Scholar, Emerald Insight, Research Gate and JSTOR and considered published empirical studies incorporating quantitative methods.

Self-Awareness and Self-Consciousness: A Review from the Perspective of Social Psychology

The terms of self-awareness and self-consciousness, which have been mentioned under various different names for centuries, they are also studied experimentally in social psychology. Within the concept of this study, the information about descriptions, raised theories, suggested concepts, significant studies and adjusted scales on these terms are reviewed from the perspective of social psychology. Although there are various different descriptions of these terms under various disciplines and a wide range of relevant literature, this study is approached only from the perspective of social psychology and limited with the most efficient studies included in the published social psychology literature. The review shall be an enlightening source for the researchers studying on social psychology and the self-concept and is concluded with suggestions on further research interests.

Mass behaviour change amid COVID-19: How public health information and social norms explain the transformation

COVID-19 is a severe and ongoing threat globally, with the spread disrupting lives and society. Despite the developments of vaccines, the key measure to reduce the transmission of variants has stemmed from mass changes to personal behaviours. COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique context, where the protection behaviours enacted by an individual are necessary to keep the community safe. A social psychological perspective can be used to understand the reasons for adherence to policies and determine what other factors can shape preventive behaviours. To resolve this, in partnership with health consumers we use an online survey, with the findings substantiating preventive behaviours are positively related to COVID-19 information access and descriptive norms. Additionally, findings demonstrate the mediating role of injunctive norms on preventive behaviour suggesting that policy makers can influence decision-making by promoting health information that provides guidance on acceptable behaviours, but also demonstrates subsequent success. The integrity of the model is substantiated by partial least squares (PLS) testing.

Analysis of personal psychological motivation and social psychological motivation of Retaliatory Justice under moral public opinion: Chinese cases.

From a social psychology perspective, this study explored the personal and social psychological motivation of Retaliatory Justice. This study constructed a four-dimensional model of the psychological motivation of Retaliatory Justice from the two dimensions of "Self vs. Society" and "Identity vs. Resource." They were Identity-Based Self-Oriented Motivation (Pacifying Outrage), Resource-Based Self-Oriented Motivation (Occupying Resource), Identity-Based Society-Oriented Motivation (Value Confirmation), and Resource-Based Society-Oriented Motivation (Deterrence and Control). In this study, 497 sets of valid data were extracted from 6 universities in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China, using 3 sets of situational experiments and the "Questionnaire Star" online survey platform as a vehicle to explore the personal motivations and psychosocial motivations of Retaliatory Justice. The empirical results showed that the situational experiment significantly verified the existence of Pacifying Outrage and Value Confirmation, and partially verified the existence of Deterrence and Control and Occupying Resource. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that only the effect of Pacifying Outrage on Retaliatory Justice showed a main effect, and the interaction between Pacifying Outrage and Deterrence and Control was not significant. Pacifying Outrage significantly affects Retaliatory Justice, while Occupying Resource significantly affects Retaliatory Justice, but the interaction between the two was not significant. Value Confirmation significantly affects Retaliatory Justice. Value Confirmation and Deterrence and Control synergistically affect Retaliatory Justice, but Deterrence and Control had no significant effect on Retaliatory Justice. Taking emotions as clues, this paper discussed the realistic value of the rheological paths of the psychological motivation of Retaliatory Justice, which brought enlightenment to the improvement of social morality, the cultivation of judicial trust, and the construction of psychological service system.

How to regulate users’ disorderly parking behavior of free-floating bike sharing? An empirical study based on social psychology

ABSTRACT The rapid development of free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) has caused the problem of disorderly parking. Previous studies exploring users’ disorderly parking behavior of the FFBS system often ignore the influential factors from the perspective of social psychology. Based on the theory of adolescent egocentrism, this study builds a research model of perceived invulnerability to explore users’ regulated parking intentions by using past behaviors as moderators. Data from 292 FFBS users and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) were used to verify the research model and hypotheses. The findings show that perceived invulnerability promotes disorderly parking intention and the positive moderating effect of past behavior. Thus, this study not only provides support for the mechanism of FFBS users’ sense of invulnerability, but also provides effective governance suggestions for managers.

Awareness of Counseling Psychology and the Significance of Counseling Service for the Graduate Studies

The study focused about students’ Mental Health Wellness from the psychological aspect and social psychological perspectives, as well as the study mainly investigated to identify challenges and complexities faced by the university students. In the study, the researcher was interested in exploring the following question: how important is Psychological Counseling in the university student community? The main objective of the study was to identify awareness among the university undergraduate community on Psychological Counseling. Because of the recent demographic and societal changes, undergraduates encounter several particular difficulties. The greatest degree of expertise in psychological counseling represented fewer than 10%. Up to 23% of the respondents had less in-depth understanding of the topic. Up to 27% of respondents seeking therapy at the institution are those with less knowledge. 33% of the students in the university’s internal environment have suffered from some mental issue and 92% of students’ do not reach psychological counseling. Findings show the importance of conducting relevant programs for undergraduates in every year at the university and building up the awareness of counseling psychology.

Media as Powerful Coping Tools to Recover from Social Exclusion Experiences? A Systematic Review on Need Restoration and Emotion Regulation through Using Media

ABSTRACT Socially excluded individuals often use media to cope with their feelings of loneliness, restore threatened needs, and regulate their emotions. However, social exclusion experiences have often been studied from a social-psychological perspective, with little consideration of media-specific characteristics. Thus, this paper aims to identify which different media applications individuals use to overcome social exclusion experiences and how effective this is in terms of need restoration and emotion regulation. A systematic review yielded 119 studies investigating 274 coping tools and 134 underlying strategies. Results indicated that media represent multifunctional tools that enable behavioral approach, behavioral avoidance, cognitive approach, and cognitive avoidance coping. Overall, using these tools was effective in 59% of all cases, with different strategies being linked to more or less effectiveness. By highlighting the theoretical implications of these findings, this paper provides six suggestions that can guide future research within this field.

Effects of Social Support and Loneliness on the Irrational Consumption Tendencies of Healthcare Products among the Elderly: A Structural Equation Model.

In recent years, with the development of the social economy and an improvement in health consciousness, the levels of demand and consumption for healthcare products have been increasing rapidly among the elderly. However, the irrational consumption of healthcare products has caused widespread concern, as it can generate economic losses and have negative effects on psychological health. Therefore, it is critical to identify the variables that can reduce tendencies toward irrational consumption in the area of healthcare products. This study aimed to explore the relationship between the irrational consumption tendencies of healthcare products, social support, and loneliness among elderly people in Hangzhou, China. In 2021, a cross-sectional survey involving 485 elderly people from three districts in Hangzhou, China, was conducted. Descriptive statistics were calculated for socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics, level of loneliness, social support, and irrational consumption tendencies. A structural equation model was used to test the impact of social support on the irrational consumption tendencies of healthcare products among the elderly and to explore the mediating effects of loneliness. The findings reveal that the average levels of social support and loneliness among the elderly were 30.63 points (total = 44 points) and 6.88 points (15 points), respectively. The average scores of the four subscales of irrational consumption tendencies, which were named susceptibility to persuasion, interpersonal influences, pursuit of added value, and fears of aging were 2.48, 2.93, 2.48, and 3.17 points (5 points), respectively. Social support had a significant effect on irrational consumption tendencies, and loneliness played a partial mediating role between social support and irrational consumption tendencies. A relationship model was constructed to examine the association between loneliness, social support, and irrational consumption tendencies among older people in relation to healthcare products. From a social support and psychological perspective, advice and countermeasures are proposed to prevent the irrational consumption of healthcare products among older people.

A social contextual review of the effects of alcohol on emotion

Drinking and drinking problems are complex phenomena. Understanding the etiology of alcohol use disorder requires consideration of biological, psychological, and social processes. It is our view that the last of these dimensions is just beginning to receive adequate scrutiny. In this selective review, we discuss the concept of a biopsychosocial analysis of the effects of alcohol. After briefly addressing biological and psychological research on alcohol's emotional effects, we bid to make a case for the vital role that social processes play in understanding why people drink. The bulk of the paper describes research illustrating the contributions that a social psychological perspective can make to advance understanding of the rewarding effects of alcohol. Overall, studies incorporating social contexts have revealed reliable evidence that alcohol enhances emotional experience in many social environments and have identified socio-contextual variables that moderate responses to alcohol. Further, these studies have broadened the scope of constructs thought to be socially rewarding, including social bonding, relationship functioning, and humor enjoyment. Our analysis concludes by identifying research areas we believe would profit from additional research.

Connections between Attitudes towards Muslims, Meta-Prejudices and Religion-Related Factors among Finnish Christian Background Youth

Finland, traditionally characterised as a Christian country, is becoming increasingly more culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, which invites investigation on intergroup relations. This study examines the connections between attitudes towards Muslims, meta-prejudice—the ingroup’s expectations of the outgroup’s negative evaluations of the ingroup—and religion-related factors among Finnish Christian-background youth (N = 140). I analysed the survey data, gathered in 2019 and 2020, by scrutinising the distributions, descriptive statistics, and statistical inferences (Spearman’s RHO, p-value). Most participants (73%) hold a positive attitude towards Muslims. There were no statistical differences between groups of different religiosities. Prejudiced Christian background youths were more likely to expect Muslims to evaluate Christians negatively. However, fairly over a half of the participants thought that Muslims evaluate Christians negatively. Cross-faith friendships and knowing religiously others through one’s parents are connected to a pro-Muslim attitude. The findings are discussed from a Finnish societal standpoint and from the social psychology perspective of reducing prejudice.

The emotional management of death and absence by forensic anthropologists in Colombia and Peru*

This article analyzes the experiences of seven forensic anthropologists working on exhumations in cases related to political violence and armed conflict in Colombia and Peru. From a critical social psychology perspective, we investigate the ways in which these professionals manage their emotions in the face of situations of violence, including murder, massacres, and enforced disappearances. We analyze both the emotional impact of confronting mass violence and the coping mechanisms developed by these professionals in order to continue doing their work. The experiences recounted by the forensic anthropologists interviewed for this study oscillate between a marked professional commitment and the need for distance to safeguard their own emotional well-being.

What is policy content and how is the public's policy support? A policy cognition study based on natural language processing and social psychology.

Public policy plays a critical role in coordinating social resources, providing public services, and promoting public value. However, few studies have systematically investigated the public's policy cognition from the objective aspect of policy content and the subjective aspect of target audience's policy support. To fill this gap, we explore the policy content via natural language processing and also policy support from the perspective of social psychology. Specifically, regarding the policy content analysis, we collect over one thousand policy documents and design an annotation system by analyzing the policy content, basic structure and text features, and then utilize text classification and information retrieval models based on the Chinese large-scale pre-trained models. Moreover, according to the policy tools identified in the content analysis, our paper investigates the audience's policy support for these tools and its influential factors. Based on a sample of 476 respondents from the whole country, we adopt the ordinary least square method to explore the key factors of policy support for supply, demand and environmental tools from three variables: political trust, policy effectiveness and knowledge of policies. This study contributes to existing literature by forming a structured understanding of policies and exploring public support for policy tools, which could benefit the practitioners during the policy-making process and also enhance successfully policy implementation.

What Explains Socioeconomic Disparities in Early Pregnancy Rates?

In this study, we integrate diverse structural, social psychological, and relational perspectives to develop and test a comprehensive framework of the processes that make early pregnancy a socially stratified phenomenon. Drawing on rich panel data collected among a sample of 940 18- to 20-year-old women from a county in Michigan, we estimate nested hazard models and formal mediation analyses to simultaneously elucidate the extent to which different mechanisms explain disparities in early pregnancy rates across maternal education levels-a key indicator of socioeconomic status. Together, our distal mechanisms explain 53 and 31 percent of the difference in pregnancy rates between young women whose mothers graduated college and young women whose mothers graduated and did not graduate high school, respectively. Reproductive desires, norms, and attitudes, relationship contexts, and educational opportunities and environment each link maternal education to young women's odds of pregnancy. Self-efficacy, however, plays only a modest role; while contraceptive affordability and knowledge are not significant pathways. These findings bring into focus the most prominent intervening mechanisms through which socioeconomic circumstances shape young women's likelihood of becoming pregnant during the transition to adulthood.

Nip risk in the bud: A system dynamic model to govern NIMBY conflict

“Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) conflict refers to public resistance to the government in delivering and operating NIMBY facilities. Although the antecedents of NIMBY conflicts are widely explored (e.g., negative externalities, public sensitivity, external triggers), there is rare literature systematically exploring their integrated effects on public resistance from the public social psychology perspective that considers the interplaying effects of public risk and emotion perception. Besides, to reflect the nonlinear change of public resistance (i.e., “emergency” and “discontinuity” features of NIMBY conflict), we originally integrate the catastrophe theory into the system dynamic method to establish an SD-Catastrophe model to simulate the evolution process of public resistance behavior. The effect of governmental response on NIMBY conflicts is especially examined in the simulation model, and the catastrophe characteristics of public resistance behavior in NIMBY conflict are verified. The result shows that governmental response contributes to eliminating NIMBY conflicts in four aspects: 1)Different facilities, different urgency; 2) The faster, the better; 3) The higher intensity, the better; and 4) Existing effect lag. Based on the nonlinear change of public resistance, two governance strategies, including the internal strategy (i.e., optimizing public psychological states) and the external strategy (i.e., controlling project external triggers), are formulated to help the government eliminate the risk of NIMBY conflict.

Insights of Collaborative Learning Approach from Social-Psychology Perspective: A Systematic Review

Collaborative learning (CL) is a learning approach that emphasizes activities that are focused on the students. Interdependence, social behavior, cognitive development, and social psychology views may all be used to explain its effectiveness. The systematic review's purpose is to investigate effective influencing elements on CL insight from a social psychology perspective. The research was evaluated using a qualitative technique and then thematically analyzed. The findings break down the success of CL interactions into three categories: social cognition, social conduct, and connections. The social-psychological aspects of collaborative learning, according to our research, have also become an important component included in curricular practices. As a consequence, starting with pre-service and building on it with teacher professional development would be better. We suggest that in the twenty-first century, collaboration, rather than rivalry, is a power to survive, and vice versa.

Associated Factors of Pesticide Packaging Waste Recycling Behavior Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior in Chinese Fruit Farmers

Pesticide packaging waste recycling is crucial in promoting the development of agricultural modernization and ensuring the safety of agricultural products, but, currently, studies on pesticide packaging waste recycling behavior at the farmer level are still scarce, especially from the perspective of social psychology and regulation paths. In the current study, we surveyed 198 farmers in Shaanxi Province, China. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to explore the associated factors of farmers’ pesticide waste packaging recycling behavior based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The results indicate that a degree of convenience and time spent affected recycling behavior. Attitude toward the behavior (AB) and subject norm (SN) showed significant associations with fruit farmers’ behavior intention (IN) in pesticide packaging waste recycling, while perceived behavior control (PBC) presented insignificant association. However, the direct association between PBC and fruit famers’ behavior in regards to pesticide packaging waste recycling was statistically significant. Our study’s results suggest that measures such as improving the policy system of pesticide packaging recycling and treatment, strengthening science popularization, publicity and guidance, standardizing pesticide packaging tips, carrying out pilot recycling programs, and improving infrastructures could be effective in promoting fruit farmers’ behavior in regards to the recycling of pesticide packaging waste.

LOTE (Languages Other than English) Teachers’ Emotions and Professional Identity in Response to Educational Reforms: A Social-Psychological Perspective

Teachers’ emotions and professional identities in response to educational reforms play a key role in teacher development and policy implementation. However, little attention has been paid to the shifting emotions of teachers of LOTEs (languages other than English). Taking a social-psychological approach, this study examines the emotional reactions and professional identities of LOTE teachers who were inspired to cater for the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. Semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis were used to probe the emotions and professional identities of 15 LOTE teachers in a Chinese foreign language university. The analysis identifies four categories of LOTE teachers’ identities: The enthusiastic accommodators, the lonely fighters, the drifting followers, and the passive executors. The findings indicate that current educational policies might lead to tensions among LOTE teachers without sufficient support, and suggest that the voices of LOTE teachers should be accommodated in the process of policy-making along with the affordances of support. The study reveals the necessity of adopting a social-psychological perspective on teacher development in the global multilingual educational context.

Barriers for women in the workplace: A social psychological perspective

AbstractWe present a social psychological perspective on the barriers that women face in the workplace. We begin by reviewing the prevailing theories of gender differences such as social role theory, role congruity theory, and prescriptive gender norms and stereotypes and then extrapolate from these social psychological mechanisms for gender differences in organizations to explain various barriers, including discrimination, prejudice, performance devaluation, backlash, and more. The genesis of many of these barriers thus result from the prescriptive, at times constrictive, social expectations that influence both the external social sanctions applied to women's behavior as well as women's individual preferences. We then review four domains in which women and men differ in their preferences and behavior in the workplace: leadership, decision‐making, negotiation, and influence. Finally, we acknowledge how the concept of gender is continuing to evolve, discuss its implications for economic inequality, and pose questions that will update our understanding of women in the workplace in the future.

Identities: A developmental social-psychological perspective

ABSTRACT In this contribution, we review research that uses a cross-fertilisation approach to integrate developmental and social-psychological perspectives on how identities are formed and changed over time and how identity processes are genuinely social, being embedded in social contexts and fed by social contents. First, we outline the three-factor identity model as a parsimonious approach to understanding the dynamics of identity development. Second, we review empirical studies with longitudinal approaches to shed light on how identity processes are embedded in key contexts such as family, friendships and society at large through behaviours such as civic engagement. Third, we discuss the interplay between personal and social identities. We conclude by highlighting how adopting a cross-fertilisation approach that combines social-psychological and developmental perspective can significantly advance the theoretical understanding of identity dynamics. Finally, we address similarities and differences between personal identity and social identity approaches, and we provide an agenda for future research.

Do disasters trigger protests? A conceptual view of the connection between disasters, injustice, and protests—The case of COVID-19

People around the globe are affected by disasters far beyond the disaster properties. Given that certain social groups are affected disproportionately, disasters need to be considered as political events which may cause political actions. Therefore, we aim to discuss, from a social psychological perspective, how and why protests might occur during or after a disaster. We argue for an elaborated model of collective action participation suggesting that disasters enhance the predictors of protest mobilization and participation though emerged or enhanced social injustice. We also suggest that disaster properties can be used to delegitimise protests and social movements, limiting the mobilization and collective resilience during and after a disaster. Finally, we discuss the gaps in current research and emphasize the need for more attention to the disaster-protest link as we can expect more disasters due to climate crisis, likely to lead to more protests and political collective action.