Social Psychological Studies Research Articles

Membership without Social Citizenship? Deservingness & Redistribution as Grounds for Equality

Western societies have experienced a broadening of inclusive membership, whether we consider legal, interpersonal, or cultural membership. Concurrently, we have witnessed increased tensions around social citizenship, notably harsher judgments or boundaries over who “deserves” public assistance. Some have argued these phenomena are linked, with expanded, more diverse membership corroding solidarity and redistribution. We maintain that such a conclusion is premature and, especially, unsatisfactory: it fails to detail the processes–at multiple levels of analysis–behind tensions over membership and social citizenship. This essay draws on normative political theory, social psychology, cultural sociology, and political studies to build a layered explanatory framework that highlights the importance of individual feelings of group identity and threat for people's beliefs and actions; the significance of broader cultural repertoires and notions of national solidarity as a source and product of framing contests; and the diverse ways elites, power, and institutions affect notions of membership and deservingness.

Sosyal Psikolojinin Altın Çağını Yeniden Düşünmek

<div><!--block-->It is tragic yet curious to realize that a historical period of great human misery can motivate great scientific endeavour. This paper argues that the “golden age” of social psychology was driven by the traumas of fascism. We first trace the roots of the World War II to modernism. We then compare the social psychological studies conducted before and after the World War II in relation to this historical background and the rationality-irrationality debate. Overall, we present a series of examples which purport to show that the “golden age” of social psychology emerged as a response to humans’ violation of different rationality norms. We conclude with a set of proposals for the amelioration of irrationality derived again from social psychological studies.</div>

Formas emotivas do discurso persuasivo

Tal como a Retórica no-lo ensina, as emoções (pathos) estão no centro do discurso persuasivo. A racionalidade argumentativa da retórica não exclui as emoções como elemento fundamental do processo persuasivo. Primeiro, porque razão e emoção andam a par no que diz respeito ao raciocínio e à tomada de decisão, tal como demonstrado por vários estudos de Neurociência e de Psicologia Social. Em segundo lugar, porque a própria persuasão envolve uma modalidade emocional paralela a uma modalidade estritamente formal ou dita “racional”.O presente artigo salienta algumas das principais formas emotivas que pontuam os discursos de natureza persuasiva, como o da publicidade: o uso da sugestão, a utilização de linguagem figurada e conotativa, ou ainda a concentração sobre as necessidades e desejos do auditório. Além dessas, destacam-se, ainda, um conjunto de efeitos emocionais relativos, quer ao auditório, quer ao orador. Embora este elencar de formas emotivas não se pretenda exaustivo, a enumeração de procedimentos emocionais nos discursos publicitários oferece-nos um preliminar esboço do alcance e consequências práticas da persuasão emocional.

Manterrupting in the German Bundestag: Gendered Opposition to Female Members of Parliament?

AbstractThe problem of manterrupting, i.e. men interrupting women to take control of a conversation, claiming superior knowledge, or discrediting women's arguments, has garnered major attention in social and traditional media. Yet scholarly accounts of gendered speech interruption patterns in parliamentary debates are less common. In this article, I argue that manterrupting can be considered a form of resistance against women in politics and, in its worst iteration, prevent female representatives from representing women's interests. This article will analyze the problem of ‘manterrupting’ regarding parliamentary debates in Germany by investigating the nature and extent of male interruptions during parliamentary debates in the 17th legislative period. Drawing on insights from social psychology and masculinity studies, this article finds that in the case of Germany, manterruptions are neither systemic and frequent enough to constitute a form of resistance against women in politics nor do they prevent female representatives from engaging in the substantive representation of women.

Please empathize! Instructions to empathise strengthen response facilitation after pain observation

ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that observing others in pain leads to a general facilitation of reaction times. The current study sheds further light on the relationship between pain observation and reaction time by exploring how bottom-up processes, in the form of perceived pain intensity, and top-down processes, in the form of explicit instructions to empathise, influence response facilitation after pain observation. Participants watched videos of a hand getting pierced by a needle or touched by a Q-tip. To manipulate bottom-up information, participants saw videos depicting either deep or shallow insertion of the needle. To investigate potential top-down modulation, half the participants were explicitly requested to empathise with the person in the video, while the other half were told to simply watch and attend to the video. Results from two experiments corroborate previous results showing response facilitation after pain observation. Critically, experiment 2 provides robust evidence that explicit instructions to empathise with a person in pain strengthen response facilitation. We discuss these results considering social cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology studies of empathy and pain observation.

Teleology and mentalizing in the explanation of action

In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent.

Building Bridges and Crossing Boundaries

Where are the boundaries between things located? When we meet another person or when we meet the tree in the forest or the sand by the shore each is changed by the other. We all know that at one level of reality we are different and yet we also know that the apparent rigidity between me and other dissolves in a constant and mutual exchange of cells, conversations and consciousness. In nature, the bridge between two points of apparent difference is a dynamic, interactive field of reciprocal engagement. Indeed, in nature, complex, reciprocal relationships are the sine qua non of ecosystems. Everything touches and is touched by everything else. It is in meeting, touching, listening and communicating with another that we discover most completely what we are and are able to express most eloquently who we are.&#x0D; The helping professions are increasingly seeking ways to bridge the epistemological gap between the atomistic and the ecological and cross those professional boundaries that have for too long kept helpers of every stripe separated and isolated from one another. Ironically, it is a new rediscovery of an ancient wisdom that is creating a catalyst for hope and change. Recently, those hopes to discover new linkages and a new era of collaborative professional partnerships to address pressing social and environmental problems took a small step forward. Professional helpers from a variety of disciplines including social work, psychology, nursing, education and environmental studies gathered in Calgary, Canada in May, 2009 for a first of its kind multi-disciplinary conference entitled: Building Bridges, Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Person, Planet and Professional Helping. The conference was suffused with both urgency and anticipation as professional helpers worked to better understand each other and those many ways they might cooperate across professional borders to build bridges to a more balanced and interdisciplinary view of the helping enterprise. This brief introduction provides a short sketch of the historical realities which created the ideological boundaries that the conference sought to bridge and how that has begun to change. It also provides a brief overview of each contributor’s work.

Child consultation and the law in the Northern Territory of Australia

AbstractConsultation with children is a delicate art, and consultation with vulnerable children, even more so. Experienced clinicians believe best practice in undertaking such work requires tertiary studies in social work or psychology combined with extensive supervised clinical experience. The current pathways to becoming a children’s lawyer in the Northern Territory do not involve mandatory training in child well-being, and yet lawyers are asked to consult with highly traumatised children and bring the voices of children into the courtroom. Lawyers for young children are additionally required to provide an opinion as to what they believe to be in the best interests of the child, without a social work or psychology-based qualification, training or in-depth guidelines to support their position. This article looks at what the law says about child consultation, what child development research says about child consultation and child consultation in practice in a Northern Territory child protection setting. At its conclusion, the author discusses potential pathways forward for lawyers and clinicians to work together in safe practices of child consultation.

How to Obtain Comparable Measures for Cross-National Comparisons

Comparisons of means or associations between theoretical constructs of interest in cross-national comparative research assume measurement invariance, that is, that the same constructs are measured in the same way across the various nations under study. While it is intuitive, this assumption needs to be statistically tested. An increasing number of sociological and social psychological studies have been published in the last decade in which the cross-national comparability of various scales such as human values, national identity, attitudes toward democracy, or religiosity, to name but a few, were tested. Many of these studies did not manage to fully achieve measurement invariance. In this study we review, in a nontechnical manner, the methodological literature on measurement invariance testing. We explain what it is, how to test for it, and what to do when measurement invariance across countries is not given in the data. Several approaches have been recently proposed in the literature on how to deal with measurement noninvariance. We illustrate one of these approaches with a large dataset of seven rounds from the European Social Survey (2002–2015) by estimating the most trustworthy means of human values, even when strict measurement invariance is not given in the data. We conclude with a summary and some critical remarks.

The common enemy effect under strategic network formation and disruption

Social psychology studies the “common enemy effect”, the phenomenon that members of a group work together when they face an opponent, although they otherwise have little in common. An interesting scenario is the formation of an information network where group members individually sponsor costly links. Suppose that ceteris paribus, an outsider appears who aims to disrupt the information flow within the network by deleting some of the links. The question is how the group responds to this common enemy. We address this question for the homogeneous connections model of strategic network formation, with two-way flow of information and without information decay. For sufficiently low linkage costs, the external threat can lead to a more connected network, a positive common enemy effect. For very high but not prohibitively high linkage costs, the equilibrium network can be minimally connected and efficient in the absence of the external threat whereas it is always empty and inefficient in the presence of the external threat, a negative common enemy effect. For intermediate linkage costs, both connected networks and the empty network are Nash for certain cost ranges.

Research in Social Psychology Changed Between 2011 and 2016: Larger Sample Sizes, More Self-Report Measures, and More Online Studies

The debate about false positives in psychological research has led to a demand for higher statistical power. To meet this demand, researchers need to collect data from larger samples—which is important to increase replicability, but can be costly in both time and money (i.e., remuneration of participants). Given that researchers might need to compensate for these higher costs, we hypothesized that larger sample sizes might have been accompanied by more frequent use of less costly research methods (i.e., online data collection and self-report measures). To test this idea, we analyzed social psychology studies published in 2009, 2011, 2016, and 2018. Indeed, research reported in 2016 and 2018 (vs. 2009 and 2011) had larger sample sizes and relied more on online data collection and self-report measures. Thus, over these years, research improved in its statistical power, but also changed with regard to the methods applied. Implications for social psychology as a discipline are discussed.

Marching Drums: An Enhanced Framework for Identifications and Securitizations

This article lays out a framework for integrating identifications into securitization theory in order to specifically and systematically illuminate the role that identifications play in determining securitization success and in delimiting effective securitization rhetoric. I outline the framework, its theoretical backing as derived from cognitive, identity, and discourse studies, its potential use, and some empirical findings emerging from its current application. The framework holds that identifications consistently affect audience receptivity to securitization rhetoric, but only in certain circumstances (namely, when identifications are strong and thick) does their precise content restrict the parameters and performative power of effective securitization rhetoric. The framework draws insights from the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, and identity studies, and it emphasises a context-specific approach to securitization studies that inquires into, rather than assumes, local situations. As such, the article aims to inform securitization scholars engaged in a range of studies of how they can incorporate local audiences into their work without imposing a universalist logic of security onto disparate circumstances.

A Review of Studies in Educational and Social Psychology

A Review of Studies in Educational and Social Psychology

Revisión narrativa de la relación entre envidia y Schadenfreude

Envy and Schadenfreude are negative emotions. Envy promotes social comparison as well as the desire to have something that is possessed by another, while Schadenfreude involves a rewarding feeling derived from the pleasure obtained for misfortune happening to the envied person. Both emotions hinder social relationships. This narrative review is based on the state of the art on the relationship between envy and Schadenfreude. A review of these concepts was carried out and social psychology and neuroscience experimental studies were analyzed. The findings indicate that the literature reviewed focuses on four factors that relate envy and Schadenfreude: 1) brain activation, 2) social conditions, 3) empathy, and 4) the merit system. Additionally, the literature showed the possibility that envy could be a predictor of Schadenfreude, which would provide basis for new research studies to test this hypothesis.

Revisión narrativa de la relación entre envidia y Schadenfreude

Envidia y Schadenfreude son emociones negativas. La envidia promueve la comparación social y el deseo de tener lo que otro tiene y Schadenfreude implica el procesamiento de recompensas desde el placer por la desgracia de quien es envidiado; ambas son contraproducentes en las relaciones sociales. Esta revisión narrativa se basa en el estado del arte de la relación entre envidia y Schadenfreude. Hizo un recorrido por los conceptos y retomó estudios experimentales desde la psicología social y la neurociencia. La conclusión señaló que la literatura revisada se centra en cuatro factores que relacionan envidia y Schadenfreude en: 1) la activación cerebral, 2) las condiciones sociales, 3) la empatía, y 4) el sistema de méritos. Adicionalmente, la literatura mostró la posibilidad de que la envidia sea un predictor de Schadenfreude, lo que posibilitaría nuevas investigaciones para demostrar esta hipótesis.

Ethnic identity and internal migration decision in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Due to differences in geographical situations and other ethnic-specific factors, different ethnic groups have developed different preferences towards migration as part of their socioeconomic norms. An ethnic group’s social norms provide a sense of identification and belonging to its members, and are hence likely to influence the decision-making of the individuals within the group. We hypothesise that the effects of these norms will be attenuated when one’s ethnic group is in the majority in their community. This case has been established in social psychology studies on the salience of social categories. Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) panel dataset combined with the 2000 and 2010 Indonesia population census data, this paper empirically investigates the role of ethnic identity in individuals’ internal migration decisions in Indonesia. The estimation exploits variation in whether an individual is living as a part of the ethnic majority or minority within their community, to explain the migration rates variation. The results demonstrate that while the individuals from more mobile ethnic groups tend to have a higher probability to migrate compared to those of less mobile ethnic groups, the effect is weakened when the individuals live as part of the majority ethnic group in the community.

Attachment in Adulthood: Recent Developments, Emerging Debates, and Future Directions.

Some of the most emotionally powerful experiences result from the development, maintenance, and disruption of attachment relationships. In this article, I review several emerging themes and unresolved debates in the social-psychological study of adult attachment, including debates about the ways in which attachment-related functions shift over the course of development, what makes some people secure or insecure in their close relationships, consensual nonmonogamy, the evolutionary function of insecure attachment, and models of thriving through relationships.

Towards Regulating Consumption in a Socio-hydrological Model for Groundwater Extraction

Abstract In this paper, we study the regulation problem for consumption in a mathematical model of groundwater extraction. The model combines the dynamics of the groundwater table with a recently introduced model of consumer behavior inspired from relevant studies in social psychology. After introducing the model, we formulate the moderation of groundwater withdrawal as an optimal control-theoretic problem. Different possibilities for the control objective are discussed and interpreted in the context of policy making for sustainable groundwater management. In the process, we also investigate the controllability of the process for an arbitrary number of agents under a fixed network topology. In the end, we present simulations of the LQR problem to demonstrate conformity of the model to the optimal control framework.

Неформална структура на класа при учениците от VIII и XI клас

The students’ grade is a specific small formal social group. Social psychology studies small groups in various aspects. But this form - the student grade - remains somewhat aside from social scientists’ interest. At the same time, the dynamics, the informal structure and the power-role structure of the students’ grades predetermines a number of processes that can be understood as a key to the pedagogical process. This article presents a comparative analysis between the informal structures of two grades – a group in 9th and 11th grades. Although the study was conducted in two different grades, it reflects the basic characteristics of the informal structure in the formation of the groups shortly before its dismissal.

Critical social psychology and interdisciplinary studies of personal life: Greater than the sum of its parts

AbstractSingleness, parenting, sexual practices, sibling rivalries, through to meal times, investigating how intimacies and personal lives are organised have always been a mainstay in critical social psychology. However, in the interdisciplinary field of studies of personal life, sociologists often take the lead. In this article, I discuss three illustrative Examples—family practices, queered studies of personal life, and emerging emotional regimes in “late modernity,” and ask how critical social psychology, with its history of investigating the social processes of subjectivity‐making, could be deployed to resolve debates that have emerged within a sociology of personal life. I suggest that clarifying critical social psychology's position in relation to broader studies of personal and intimate life would showcase the distinctiveness of critical social psychological contributions in understanding relational selves, whilst simultaneously fostering interdisciplinary working.