Social psychology has long claimed neutrality in its explanations of collective behaviour, yet its foundational theories of crowds have repeatedly been co-produced with institutions of authority and mobilized in the reactionary governance of social order. This article challenges the discipline's familiar origin myth-centred on benign laboratory demonstrations of social influence-by re-situating crowd psychology as one of social psychology's earliest and most politically consequential points of emergence. From nineteenth-century crowd theory, through mid-twentieth-century de-individuation research, to contemporary public-order doctrine, assumptions about the inherent irrationality and danger of collective action have been repeatedly reformulated in scientific form, their persistence reflecting institutional and ideological fit rather than explanatory adequacy. Against this background, the article repositions the Social Identity Approach and the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) not merely as theoretical corrections, but as a reorientation of how psychological knowledge is produced, authorized and used. Drawing on ethnographic participatory action research and sustained engagement with policing institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it conceptualizes collective behaviour as interactional and normatively organized, with policing practices constitutive of crowd dynamics rather than external to them. The article argues that co-production is not a methodological innovation but a historically persistent condition of social psychology and that the ESIM represents a distinctive attempt to govern this condition reflexively by redirecting psychological knowledge towards legitimacy, restraint and the facilitation of democratic rights. The broader implication is that social psychology cannot plausibly claim political neutrality: its concepts travel into institutions and practices, shaping how collective action is anticipated, governed and policed.

The colonial past and/in history textbooks: A literature review.

Navigating diversity among nationally diverse children in schools: Voices of teachers, counselors, and students.

While extensive research has examined the consequences of objectification in specific contexts (e.g., sexual or workplace settings), little is known about how interpersonal personal relationship is related to objectification. Similarly, although attachment theory explains relational patterns, its connection to interpersonal objectification-particularly via socio-cognitive processes like Theory of Mind (ToM) and empathy-remains largely unexplored. This study addresses these gaps by investigating the relationship between attachment insecurity and objectification of others via ToM and empathy. In three well-powered studies conducted in Poland, the UK, and Italy (N=1222) we found a consistent relationship between attachment avoidance and interpersonal objectification, i.e., the higher the level of attachment avoidance, the higher the tendency to objectify others. Crucially, this relationship was accounted for by levels of ToM (Study 2 & 3) and empathy (Study 3). We discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on attachment styles and objectification, and the importance of integrating these findings into broader models of social and personality psychology.

Comparisons in psychological research are often directional, with one entity (a group, situation, condition, or measurement) that is the "target" of the comparison being compared to a baseline or reference point (the "referent"). A particular unidirectional framing often gets entrenched in a research tradition. This can be problematic because people (including researchers) focus disproportionately on the target rather than on the referent of directional comparisons. They thus mainly seek explanations for differences or similarities in processes associated with the target. As a consequence, a unidirectional perspective obscures ideas and impedes theoretical progress, particularly if the designation of the referent was arbitrary (i.e., not representing a default) to begin with. We first examine mechanisms that entail unidirectionality in research traditions. Drawing primarily on social psychology (but with an eye toward the broader field of psychology), we review examples in which a dominant unidirectional perspective has been fruitfully challenged. We then present four case studies from domains characterized by unidirectionality in which reversing the direction of comparison could stimulate new insights. We provide guidelines for avoiding or reversing one-way theoretical paths and consider metaquestions that our analysis provokes. We end with limitations of our work and recommendations for future research.

Editorial: The interface between social psychology and educational psychology: interactional phenomena in educational settings

The Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS) is a widely used measurement tool to assess mental health providers' attitudes toward adopting research-based interventions. To date, this scale has not been used or validated in an interdisciplinary sample of mental health professionals in Latin America. This study investigated the factor structure, psychometric properties, cross-cultural validity, and model fit of the EBPAS in a sample of Spanish-speaking and Latino social workers, counselors, and psychologists. A culturally and linguistically tailored version of the 15-item EBPAS scale was administered to a sample of Puerto Rican mental health professionals (N = 222) working across various settings, including schools, healthcare clinics, and community organizations. The EBPAS's scores were derived from four distinct constructs involving willingness to adopt EBPs (i.e., requirements, openness to innovation, appeal, and divergence from research). A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) examined the psychometric properties of the EBPAS scale. Several first and second-order factor models were specified. A global and approximate fit examination of the measurement model and composite reliability estimation for each subscale was conducted. RStudio version 4.3.1 software was used for the CFA. The CFA supported a first-order factor model. Most subscales showed strong reliability coefficients ranging from 0.83 to 0.91, except for the divergence subscale, which showed a coefficient of 0.77. After allowing for covariance between two items in the appeal dimension, the correlated factor model demonstrated a satisfactory fit to the data, although some misspecification was observed. The tailored EBPAS-15 demonstrated adequate psychometric properties in this Latinx sample of mental health professionals, suggesting that its factor structure and reliability may be useful in a Spanish-speaking and Caribbean sample of mental health professionals working across a variety of settings and contexts. Findings contribute to the scant literature on culturally and linguistically validated measures examining attitudes toward EBPs in Latin America.

ABSTRACT This article explores the migration experiences of Georgian migrants in Germany through the lens of age cohorts and gender differences. Based on 50 in-depth interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023, the study employs narrative analysis informed by theoretical frameworks from social psychology. The analysis focuses on narrative segments related to migration motivations, integration strategies, identity transformation, and diasporic engagement. Findings indicate that migrants’ social and psychological adaptation processes are closely shaped by age, gender, and biographical trajectories. The data reveal significant age cohorts and gender-based variation in the domains of motivation, strategies of integration, identity dynamics, and engagement with diasporic networks. Younger migrants (<35) tend to embrace hybrid identities, whereas older individuals (>35) more often report cultural dissonance and feelings of marginalization. Female participants more frequently develop ‘soft’ integration strategies, while male participants describe psychological struggles related to status, identity, and hierarchical dynamics within the diaspora. The study demonstrates that migration is not merely geographic relocation, but rather a continuous process of negotiating selfhood and belonging. It highlights the multidimensional psychosocial transitions that migrants undergo in the intercultural space – transitions that involve both micro- and macro-level adaptation and the reconfiguration of cultural identity.

ABSTRACT Studies of higher education illustrate that summative assessments have important implications for learner access to opportunities or rewards, and learner perceptions of summative assessment fairness can affect learning and motivation. At the same time, social psychology research suggests perceptions of fairness may differ depending upon learner self-identities, but studies of assessment in higher education have not fully incorporated self-theories of students. We posit that undergraduate self-construals, or how individuals perceive themselves in relation to others, can play a role in perceptions of summative assessment fairness. The aims of this study are to better understand relationships between self-construals and perceptions of summative assessment fairness, and to explore whether self-esteem moderates relationships between self-construals and perceived fairness of summative assessment outcomes. The sample included 214 undergraduate students from the US (105) and South Korea (109). Participants completed multiple rounds of a learning task, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, via computers in lab settings and were asked about their general perceptions of fairness for absolute and relative assessment procedures, and their perceptions of fairness for manipulated summative assessment outcomes based upon their performance on the WCST. No direct relationship between self-construals and general perceptions of relative or absolute summative assessment procedure fairness were identified. However, results do indicate that students oriented towards interdependent self-construals with high self-esteem were more likely to accept lower summative assessment outcome values as fair relative to students oriented towards interdependent self-construals with low self-esteem. The opposite moderating effect of self-esteem is present for students oriented towards independent self-construals.

The aim of this article is to synthesize existing knowledge in a novel way by looking through a social psychological lens at historical manifestations of antisemitism and its most recent variant, presented as a case study which tracks its development and compares it with the core demonology of antisemitism. By reviewing literature representing many different disciplines, focusing particularly on history, theology and social psychology, the article aims to bridge disciplinary gaps, making social psychological insights on inter-group relations and social identities accessible to scholars in other fields and thus foster a cross-disciplinary dialogue on antisemitism. Linguistic “innovation” has been needed whenever an existing variety becomes politically incorrect, which, on the individual level, may give rise to a denial that the new variety is antisemitism. It is concluded that compared to other racisms applied research is still needed to fill the existing lacuna to find remedies for antisemitism.

This review article explores the applicability of the Social Identity Approach (SIA) in historical research, focusing on research and sources from the Early Modern era, particularly the context of the Lutheran Reformation. The study argues that while identity is often treated as self-evident in religious historical research, SIA offers conceptual tools that can enrich historical interpretation. Using examples from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers’ texts, the article demonstrates how boundaries of “true Christianity” were negotiated and maintained, and how the conceptualizations of SIA could be used in these discussions. It also highlights methodological challenges: historians lack direct access to human cognitive processes and must rely on mediated, fragmentary sources, which necessitates contextualization and source criticism to avoid anachronism. SIA should therefore be employed as a heuristic framework rather than a predictive model. When applied critically, it enables nuanced analysis of identity construction and group dynamics, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between history and social psychology.

Widowhood is a funeral rite of purification that allows marital ties to be broken or even rearranged following the death of a spouse. In the event of death, society often organises widowhood rites with a view to accepting the loss. The relationship that once existed between the two spouses sometimes causes psychological distress or turmoil for the survivor, particularly due to denial of the death. This article is a work of social psychology that focuses on cultural data from the Cameroonian environment. It is based on observations of the behaviour of community members who have suffered the death of a spouse. The data collected from participants using a questionnaire were subjected to chi-square analyses. These corroborate our predictions, namely that the practices of the widowhood rite are closely linked to the attitude developed towards said rite.

In recent years, personality detection — the use of computational methods to automatically determine an individual’s personality from various data sources — has seen widespread adoption across a variety of fields. This paper argues that despite their widespread use, conventional personality detection methods are limited in their ability to grasp human personality. Specifically, three limitations of conventional personality detection methods are discussed: (1) their limited ability to grasp the complexity of human personality due to their reliance on predetermined categories, known as pre-structured methods; (2) their inability to grasp the impact of social and cultural context on human personality, and (3) their disregard of the performative nature of human personality in online environments. Drawing on insights from anthropology and social psychology, three solutions to these limitations are proposed: (1) embracing naturalistic inquiry to capture the complexity of human personality, (2) considering the contextual influences on personality expression through multimodal methods and ethnographic research; and (3) accounting for the systematic biases present in personality in online environments in how we present our results and draw conclusions. Integrating these solutions would allow researchers to develop a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of human personality in a wide variety of fields.

The present study examines how social media engagement shapes environmental well-being among university students by integrating social connectedness, sustainability awareness, and perceived social support into a unified explanatory framework. Grounded in perspectives on social capital, digital connectedness, and environmental psychology, the study conceptualizes environmental well-being as an outcome influenced by the social and cognitive processes activated during online interactions. Social media is viewed as a context that enables relationship-building, identity reinforcement, and the circulation of sustainability-related meanings, all of which may contribute to more positive environmental orientations. Within this framework, social connectedness is positioned as a key mechanism that links online engagement with environmental well-being, while sustainability awareness and perceived social support serve as conditions that may strengthen this link. The study's implications highlight the potential for leveraging social media platforms to promote environmental engagement among university students through strategies that enhance connectedness, awareness, and supportive digital environments.

Given growing political polarization in recent years, partisan dislike-defined as the negativity that individuals display at the prospect of having close social relations with supporters of the other party-has received increasing attention. While traditional work in social and political psychology has held that conservatives display greater outgroup hostility than liberals, the worldview conflict perspective suggests that both groups similarly express hostility toward value incongruent outgroups. Contradicting both established perspectives, we present evidence across five preregistered studies (and two additional studies reported in the Supplemental Materials) conducted between 2022 and 2023-two social media field experiments (N = 10,000) examining actual behavior and five survey-based studies (N = 2,443) operationalizing partisan dislike in various ways (e.g., blocking on social media, rating the likability of various targets, and evaluating hiring suitability)-that Democrats (i.e., liberals) dislike Republicans (i.e., conservatives) more than vice versa. We provide a potential explanation for this phenomenon by extending the worldview conflict perspective to account for asymmetries in how moralized specific values are among two conflicting groups at a given point in time. Specifically, we theorize that in light of recent social trends in the modern-day United States, the moralized belief that counter-partisans pose harm to disadvantaged groups, particularly racial/ethnic minorities, has become an asymmetric contributor to partisan dislike among Democrats. We found support for our theory across both measurement-of-mediation and experimental-mediation approaches and in both field experimental and survey data. Overall, this work advances research on ideology and outgroup hostility and extends the worldview conflict perspective to better explain partisan dislike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The study of language attitudes is of special importance for the social psychology of language. Formal measurements of attitudes provide us with findings that could be used to predict the linguistic behaviour of members of a given social group in terms of their use of linguistic varieties in bilingual and bi-dialectal situations. This study investigated the attitudes of Xitsonga first language urban youth in Soshanguve towards the accents of the rural elderly in Giyani, as well as the attitudes of the Xitsonga L1 rural elderly in Giyani towards urban youth accents in Soshanguve. Forty urban youth and ten rural elderly respondents participated in the study, using an adaptation of the matched guise technique, and focus and semi-structured interviews. The survey findings show that the attitudes of the Xitsonga L1 urban youth towards the accents of rural elderly were significantly negative, while the attitudes of the Xitsonga L1 rural elderly towards the accents of urban youth were equally significantly negative.

ABSTRACT Studies have concluded that Laos is a ‘satellite’ or ‘vassal’ state of China due to its increasing dependence on China’s financial investments over the past years. Therefore, the expectation is that, during Laos’ Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) chairmanships in 2016 and 2024, Laos would take a stance similar to Cambodia's in 2012, slightly siding with China on the South China Sea dispute. However, such expectations never came to fruition, as Laos surprisingly leaned more towards the ASEAN Way by remaining neutral in its role. Bridging social psychology’s uncertainty-identity theory can offer unique interpretations of Laos’ foreign policy, revealing ideational facets uncommon in the existing literature. This explanatory empirical case study examines Laos’ ASEAN chairmanships over the past 10 years and bridges the uncertainty-identity theory to identity, self-categorization, and entitativity. The study found that: (1) A sense of uncertainty in identity surfaced due to Laos’ concerns over the discourse of China’s ‘predatory’ lending practices in the region; (2) the deliberate self-categorization to abide by the ASEAN Way by associating with the regional grouping’s prototypical attributes and displaying neutrality; and (3) ASEAN as a high entitativity regional grouping, motivating Laos to align further with the regional grouping’s norms and goals.

Organizational psychology portrays workplace inauthenticity as an aversive state that individuals passively endure. Social psychology regards it as a threat to individuals' virtuous true self that they actively defend against. Bridging the two literatures, we predict that workplace inauthenticity triggers an active defense in the form of organizational cynicism, an effect mediated through perceived person-organization value incongruence. The current research reports six studies (total N = 2,844) testing these novel predictions. Using an experimental-causal-chain design, Studies 1a and 2 found that experimentally manipulated workplace inauthenticity predicted perceived value incongruence, and experimentally manipulated value incongruence predicted organizational cynicism. Using a cross-lagged design and a multicultural sample, Study 1b triangulated Study 1a in the field. Using a time-lagged design and ecologically valid or behavioral measures of organizational cynicism, controlling for trait cynicism and trait negative affectivity, and bolstered by non-U.S. or preregistered pilot studies reported in the Supplemental File, Study 3 found support for our predictions in the field. Experimentally or statistically excluding negative affect as a confound or an alternative mechanism, and bolstered by pilot studies reported in the Supplemental File, Studies 4a and 4b examined indirect effects of manipulated workplace inauthenticity on organizational cynicism via perceived value incongruence. We conclude that individuals agentically cope with workplace inauthenticity through morally delegitimizing expressions and subversive behaviors toward employing organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Universal, systematic psychosocial screening in childhood cancer assures care matched to need and achieves a Standard of Psychosocial Care. It is accomplished inconsistently due to barriers at the family, provider, and institution level, potentially contributing to disparities in care and outcomes. We conducted a comparative effectiveness trial of two implementation strategies of an established measure (Psychosocial Assessment Tool; PAT3.0) across 18 children's cancer programs to identify strategies that resulted in higher levels of screening in English and Spanish (penetration, health equity). We also examined uptake at the institution level (adoption). Sites were randomized to Strategy I (web-based training curriculum [WebTC] + a written, site-specific Implementation Plan) or Strategy II (Strategy I + Consultation Calls + a Champion) and to one of three year-long cohorts. Randomization was stratified by site size (new patients/year (small [< 50], medium [50-149], large [> 150]). Sites provided data to a central data coordinating site, including eligible and screened patients/families and type of insurance as a proxy for socioeconomic status (SES). ANOVAs compared percentage of eligible patients/families screened, eligible Hispanic patients/families screened, patients/families screened by identified race, patients/families screened by SES, and feedback provided to families across Strategy. Data from a WebTC feedback form and the sites' PAT implementation plans were summarized. There were no differences between Strategy I and II in percentage of patients/families screened for 1) all eligible families; 2) Hispanic families; 3) identified race; 4) SES; and 5) feedback provided. Exploratory analyses examining strategy by size by cohort, identified lower percentages of patients/families screened in the second cohort. The WebTC was rated as clear and helpful in understanding the importance of screening and how to screen as part of workflow. On the PAT Implementation Plan, most sites screened a subsample of their cancer program population (e.g., inpatients, hematologic malignancies) with social workers or psychologists as screeners. Comprehensive web-based training + Implementation Plan supported implementation of an established psychosocial screener, inclusive of racial and ethnic minoritized, English and Spanish-speaking, and lower SES patients/families. Implementation planning to address barriers at the patient, providers, and institution levels is indicated for successful screening of all patients and as part of childhood cancer program efforts to meet the Psychosocial Standards. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04446728, registered 23 June 2020. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04446728.

The article presents a theoretical and methodological analysis of the professional training of future social workers for preventive and corrective work with youth exhibiting deviant behavior in the context of socio-economic and cultural transformations in Ukraine. Professional training is considered a multi-level process aimed at developing integrated readiness for professional activity, including theoretical, practical, and personal-professional components. The theoretical component provides knowledge of social pedagogy, psychology, and sociology necessary to analyze the causes of deviant behavior and develop preventive and corrective programs. The practical component focuses on the development of professional skills in counseling, social support, training technologies, and role-based interaction models. The personal-professional component aims to cultivate empathy, stress resilience, self-regulation, communication, and organizational abilities. Readiness for professional activity manifests at functional, personal-activity, and individual-personal levels, ensuring mobilization of psychophysical resources, alignment of cognitive, emotional, and motivational components, and activation of personal qualities for effective performance of socio-pedagogical functions. The methodological foundations of professional training combine axiological and systemic approaches: the former forms value orientations and moral-ethical principles of professional activity, while the latter views training as an integrated pedagogical system with interconnected components. Significant attention is also given to environmental, informational, and technological approaches, which provide practical experience through participation in project, research, and community work, foster information competence, and enable mastery of modern socio-pedagogical technologies for working with youth exhibiting deviant behavior.