Over the past fifty years, Europe and the Middle East have witnessed significant demographic shifts, resulting in increasingly diverse classrooms, with 70% of primary school-age refugees enrolled in school (UNHCR, 2022). Diverse classrooms offer children valuable opportunities to form friendships and engage with peers from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences (Killen et al., 2013). Such interactions can promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors (Gönültaş & Mulvey, 2023). However, diversity can also introduce opportunities for negative stereotypes, biases, and attitudes to be expressed (Levy & Killen, 2008). When this happens, children’s interactions may devolve into prejudice, discrimination, and exclusionary behaviors—such as intergroup bullying (Demir & Ozgul, 2019).
​
What Is Intergroup Bullying?
Intergroup bullying refers to consistent hostile actions aimed at individuals due to their membership in a specific group. This group-based targeting may involve factors such as nationality, immigration/refugee status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability (Palmer & Abbott, 2018). This form of bullying is particularly harmful, often resulting in long-term psychological and educational consequences for those victimized (Killen et al., 2013; Menesini & Salmivalli, 2017).
The profound impact of intergroup bullying is highlighted in a qualitative study with Syrian refugee children in Türkiye (Demir & Ozgul, 2019). Some participants shared that, despite being enrolled in school, they rarely attended or had dropped out. For instance, one child explained:
"Initially, I attended school, but I don’t do it anymore. That’s because I was mistreated there. They said to me, ‘Go back to Syria. You are not wanted here.’ I felt sorry and decided not to go to school because I would cry all the time."
Another participant described her struggle with integration after immigrating to Türkiye at age five. She said she missed her friends in Syria and had trouble making new ones: 
"I had a fight with Turkish children and had to leave school. They kept taking away my ball and yelling at me, ‘Chase after the Syrian.’ I fought back, but later I was kicked out of school. I don’t feel like going back. I have lost my motivation. I’m not competent in either Arabic or Turkish, so school makes no sense to me."
These firsthand accounts reveal the devastating emotional and educational toll of intergroup bullying on refugee children, underscoring the importance of understanding and addressing this issue.

The Role of Bystanders in Preventing Intergroup Bullying
Bystanders play a critical role in either perpetuating or preventing bullying. By intervening, bystanders can challenge the norms that fuel intergroup bullying and create a safer, more inclusive environment (Salmivalli et al., 2011). Yet, stepping in is not always straightforward. The process of intervening involves several complex decisions, as outlined in the five-step intervention model: (1) recognizing the bullying, (2) assessing the situation as an emergency, (3) feeling responsible to intervene, (4) determining the most effective way to help, and (5) taking action (Nickerson et al., 2014).
In cases of intergroup bullying, the victim’s identity becomes particularly significant. Refugees, often a visible "out-group," are frequent targets (Gönültaş & Mulvey, 2019). According to the UNHCR's Global Trends report, 31.6 million refugees worldwide need international protection, and 40% of them are children (UNHCR, 2023). These refugee children face heightened risks of psychological distress (Bronstein & Montgomery, 2011), and potential intergroup bullying in schools.

Building Social Cohesion
In host societies, majority group children often wield the social power to either include or exclude others, making their reactions to refugee peers crucial for fostering inclusive classrooms. For example, a simple storybook intervention in which children were asked to focus on the emotions of the protagonist – a Syrian child whose family fled and would be joining their school – resulted in higher prosocial behavior intentions toward the refugee child (Taylor & Glen, 2020). More research is needed to understand if such interventions also work to promote bystander intervention in cases of intergroup bullying. 
As our societies become increasingly diverse, focusing on how to reduce intergroup bullying and to support children’s prosocial bystander behavior becomes vital. Through evidence-based interventions, we can build inclusive school environments, where all students feel valued, safe, and accepted, that not only celebrate diversity but also promote wider social cohesion.

By Serengeti Ayhan, Bilkent University, & Laura K. Taylor, University College Dublin

Have you ever considered how much, as humans, we are connected to stories? We read stories to children to help them sleep and to ourselves to escape reality. As scientists, we share our research by telling stories that aim to explain what our findings mean and how they apply to life. 
Our identities are stories, formed by memories that frequently replay and come to describe a sense of ‘me’ – the kindness we've received, the challenges we've faced, the people we love, and the choices we've made. Many of our ideas about love and romance come from stories that are told on the big screen and through social media. And love itself is intertwined with stories: When people enter a romantic relationship, their stories of ‘me’ become stories of ‘us’, based on shared experiences meshed together with another person (Dunlop, 2019). As Toni Morrison (1993) once said, “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.” Stories create us and our world. 
Storytelling is also a universal human trait. Evolutionary theorists believe it developed as a way to share information and foster cooperation among early humans, and in turn, promoting group survival (Smith et al. 2017). After all, human history is full of stories, from ancient myths to modern schools of thought. 
Storytelling is also important in Indigenous cultures. Bessarab and Ng’andu (2010) describe yarning as an Indigenous way of conversing and storytelling, which relies on existing relationships. Yarns are meaningful because they help to create, and are part of, a common social identity: The idea that who we are is based on a sense of us. Because storytelling plays a unique role for Indigenous peoples, it's important to respect cultural differences and not impose a Western story when conducting research in these contexts (Caxaj 2015).
This story-based approach is also used in medicine to understand patients' experiences and help them process their health issues – tales of what happened, why, and how can I get better (Fioretti et al. 2016). 
We can see that stories are everywhere, in our own lives and in the media all around us, from uplifting tales to ones full of conflict. 
So, why are stories so important to us? 
Bühler and Dunlop (2019) suggest that stories help us make sense of the world, by providing logic and meaning by combining our past, present, and future. The tales we know help us navigate our own tales of woe. This helps us adapt and change over time. As we’ve seen, stories also shape our identity and group memberships, helping us feel unique and connected. It’s always a special moment when we share a story with the people we care about. 
If asked, "Who are you?" you might describe your roles and social groups, like family, friends, and work. Being a part of a group has always made us feel as though we are more – a part of something bigger than just a simple, lonely ‘me’. Ultimately, stories help us learn, teach, organise our lives, understand events, and define who we are. They are embedded in every aspect of the human experience: history, culture, language, and identity. We are truly enamoured of stories.

By Joel Whalan

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has fuelled debate about who is ‘European’. Yet, European identity is an elusive construct. A European identity can offer a sense of belonging to a group larger than the nation, prompting solidarity with a larger collection of people. Youth are more likely to identify as European than their older counterparts; moreover, childhood and adolescence are crucial periods for identity development. Here, we synthesise research on the development of European identity across childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

We conducted a Rapid Evidence Assessment of European identity in 4-25 year olds, to understand (1) how to measure European identity, and what (2) predictors and (3) outcomes are linked with youth’s European identity.

The REA included 11 papers from disciplines such as psychology, education and sociology. Across the studies, five themes summarised how European identity is defined and measured in young people (Figure 1). The Complexity of European identity is reflected in the lack of a consistent tool to measure European identity, and permeates the other themes. European identity is also Ascriptive, as youth choose to identify as such, in search of the sense of Belonging that it may bring. European identity is closely related to the EU motto, United in Diversity, as we see both Similarity – such as a shared culture, history, desires and political identity, and Difference – as national subgroups under the ‘European’ umbrella have different historical, cultural and linguistic roots; there is variation in who identifies as European.

But, how is a European identity fostered? What implications does a European identity bring for those youth who hold it dear?

School-based interventions and tailored curricula can contribute to stronger European identification among youth, though effects vary based on group membership and status. Artistic programmes give insight into European identity construction among younger children. Knowledge about Europe and the EU give rise to stronger European identification, though political trust and the benefits of EU membership are stronger influences. Cross-border experiences through travel and friendships, and higher socio-economic status contribute to stronger identification. In terms of the implications of European identity in youth, two main benefits have been identified: more positive intergroup attitudes and political participation.
​
There is a small but growing body of research on European identity among young people. Developing a measurement tool which taps into the complexities of the development of European identity is a fundamental next step in this research. Furthermore, only one study focused on youth under age 12, pointing to the need to study childhood. Given the promising findings of school-based interventions, and the effect of such a (potentially) unifying identity on social inclusion and political participation, this is an exciting area for future research for the 142 million young people living in Europe today. 

By Isabelle Nic Craith and Laura K. Taylor

I want to start, as usual, by acknowledging our group’s successes:

In 2021, the lab saw Susilo Wibisono, Zahra Mirnajafi, and Kiara Minto awarded their PhDs, whoohoo!  Following submission, Zahra continued into a post-doctoral research role working with Jolanda Jetten in Iran; Susilo worked with me on our Voluntary Assisted Dying grant and secured funding for a project on religious and secular environmental collective action in Indonesia (with me and Robyn Gulliver); and Kiara worked on the Voluntary Assisted Dying grant before transitioning in 2022 to a post-doc on Sexual Violence and the Limits of Consent, led by Lisa Featherstone.  Well done everyone!  I’m looking forward to seeing what you get up to in 2022. Susilo and Kiara were able to graduate in person last year – floppy hats of awesomeness modelled in pix.  

​ Our three 2021 Social Change Lab undergraduate honours students, Mathias Lai Woa, Mary Shaw, and Stuart Wilkinson, also triumphantly submitted their theses and graduated with honours, despite the rockiest year I can recall for ethics and data-collection – and former honours students will know the bar is high on that one.  A big ‘Woot!’ all round, and my sincere apologies to the honours students for subjecting them to the new ‘streamlined’ ethics process.  I won’t make that mistake again.  Below you can see them thinking, thank goodness that’s over! 

In other good news, Léïla Eisner, who had secured a post doc from the Swiss government to work (online) with me in 2021 on norms and collective action, won a second post-doctoral fellowship from the Swiss government to continue her work in 2022. Congratulations Léïla!  In mid-2021, Léïla accepted a Best Dissertation Award from the International Society for Political Psychology for her PhD thesis work, which surely would have helped.  Robyn Gulliver, who finished a PhD in 2020 in the lab, completed a post doc on collective action at HKU with Christian Chan and me in 2021, and secured a UQ post doc with Kelly Fielding for 2022; well done Robyn!  Robyn also won the distinctive works prize and student prize for the 'Campaign Explorer' citizen science project from the Australian Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (the first time someone has won both).  Gi Chonu, who graduated in 2020 also, received an award for going above and beyond in her first year of work at the Singapore campus of James Cook Uni, the JCU Quiet Achiever Award  – great work Gi!  Finally, Cassandra Chapman, who finished in 2019 in the lab, picked up a string of funding – an early career fellowship (DECRA) and two grants (Linkage and Discovery).  Congrats Cass!  What a way to jumpstart the next phase of your career!

2021 also saw many other students working through their other milestones, including Robin and Hannibal who finished their thesis reviews, and Eunike, Liberty and Tulsi who are moving into their final years after having completed their mid-candidature reviews.  Tulsi also started a business, in the middle of the pandemic, which is doing very well – congratulations Tulsi!  

Our social change lab affiliates, volunteers, and visitors also kept the lab meetings lively in addition to mustering a string of successes of their own.  Thank you and congratulations to Alicia Steele, Saleena Ham, Helena Radke, Hema Selvanathan, Jo Brown, Mai Tanjitpiyanond, Mina Fu, Madeleine Hersey, and Zoe Gath.  A special shout out to Mai, who won the 2021 Outstanding Postgraduate Research Award from the Society for Australasian Social Psychology (woot!), and to Hema Selvanathan who secured a five year gig at UQ, which is a wonderful step.  Well done Hema!  It’s also exciting to acknowledge the successes of former students and social change lab visitors and collaborators – Michael Thai and Fiona Barlow won an ARC Discovery in this year's round, and so did our collaborators Annie Pohlman, Emma Thomas, and Vera te Velde. Huzzah!

Coming back to our lab visitors and volunteers, I also completed a fun ‘staff-student partnership’ in July 2021 with a team of undergraduate students, who helped to assemble resources for my 4th year course in Applied Social Psychology. Many thanks to this energetic team: Krisya Nor Sabrina Azman, Jason Neame, Megan Kah En Chong, Anindya Permata Putri Tarigan, Kathryn Pearson, Frances Elliott, Samara Phelan, Eugene Cho, Olivia Hannah Mann, and Nanna Thomsen.  Tarli Young, Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, Kiara Minto, and Susie Burke also completed guest lectures in PSYC4181. You made the course a lot stronger, and I’m grateful, thank you.  In other teaching news, in Semester 1 2021, Jo Brown and I reprised our successful partnership for PSYC3010, and we are also collaborating with another colleague, Janine Lurie, to develop resources for online teaching with JAMOVI.  We’ll see how we go in the coming months at taking some steps towards this big transition.

In other news looking ahead to 2022, we are excited to welcome Charlie Pittaway to the lab, starting a PhD supervised by Kelly Fielding and myself on youth responses to climate change.  Zoe Gath and Madeleine Hersey and Olivia Mann will also rejoin the lab for their 2022 honours year.  Welcome!

And after this string of congratulations, I want to close by commenting that in 2021, simply keeping your head above water was a huge achievement.  To those who spent the year drowning in drama from COVID and elsewhere, I salute you, and I acknowledge your struggle.  You are worthy. 😊

Here’s hoping that 2022 is equally and more fun, productive, healthy, happy and social for us and for the group!

Other news of 2021 engagement and impact 
In 2021, we had our normal collective plethora of journal articles (listed below; see also our publications page) and missed out for the most part on conferences, due to the ongoing disruption of COVID (some lab COVID resources listed here).  

​I did participate online in the Indonesia Council Open Conference, as well as in the Social Psychology Association-Indonesian Psychology Association (IPS-HIMPSI) 2021, and some seminars – the one for the AVERT network (Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism) is online here.  We also some fun virtual lab meetings – I presented to Immo Fritsche’s group, for example, and our lab hosted three of Martijn van Zomeren’s students and the man himself in a symposium in October.  Please reach out if you are interested in this kind of connection, if your lab’s research interests align with ours – it’s easier than ever for us to facilitate this, and great fun and learnings for the students, not to mention staff. 

I also very much enjoyed being part of the collaborative research project https://psycorona.org/ this year - there are many interesting papers starting to flow from the work, also listed below.  It was exciting to finally publish the DIME empirical work in two high impact pieces, a paper led by Morgana Lizzio-Wilson in Psychological Science and our big team’s work in SPPS. 

I find most of my own papers interesting (*cough*), but I particularly enjoyed the monograph that we published with Cambridge University press (Robyn Gulliver, Susilo Wibisono, Kelly Fielding, and I) on The Psychology of Effective Activism.  This piece builds on a lot of past work and has our new theoretical model, ABIASCA, which is about the goals and outcomes of collective action – goals which include raising Awareness, Building sympathy, generating Intentions, turning intentions into Actions, Sustaining movements over time, Coalition-building, and Avoiding counter-mobilisation.  I’m happy to share the paper (as well as any others from the lab) if people are interested.

Socialchangelab online in 2022

I want to give a big shout out to Kiara Minto, who worked tirelessly in 2020-2021 to solicit, edit, and publish the blog posts at socialchangelab.net, and to encourage creation and updating of our pages.  Thank you Kiara for all your great work last year with our inhouse writers, our guest bloggers, and the site!  As Kiara has moved on to her new post-doctoral role, I’m looking for energy in this space, so please reach out if you have some.  We have some money for this role in 2022, so I’ll be advertising if I don’t get a suitable self-nomination first.

We continue to welcome each new reader of the blogs and the lab site with enthusiasm, and if you have ideas for guest blogging, by all means contact me to discuss them.  Social Change Lab has received a bequest to facilitate our work in research and research translation (below) so I will hope to see a strong set of writing this year, but always room for more.

We also started our Psychology of Change YouTube videos, so fun.  A list of the videos is online here  and the channel can be accessed here.  Season 1 (explainer videos on persuasive conversations) and Season 2 (on collective action) are both already online. I’d like to thank Robyn Gulliver for her vision and persistence with this effort, as well as the wider lab for feedback and suggestions, and James Casey and Lily Kramer who helped out along the way. I also thank the academics who contributed to the published ​videos, John Drury and Martijn van Zomeren, as well as to thank Dr. Susie Burke, Prof. Daniel Rothbart, and Dr. Maria Fernandez-Jesus, among others, who recorded videos for the lab last year and have been patiently waiting ever since for their publication.  Season 3 is bogged down on my laptop due to IT and life drama, but hopefully will see the light of day before too much longer.

The lab and I also are still active for work on Twitter, and I hope that you will follow @WlouisUQ and @socialchangelab if you are on Twitter yourself.  Our facebook page is now entering its second year: https://www.facebook.com/The-Social-Change-Lab-research-by-Winnifred-Louis-and-team-109966340687649/ .  It has been updated in 2021 a patchy and not-that-exciting manner, but we’ll see how it goes in 2022 and beyond.

 What the new year holds:

In 2022, at the moment I have no plans for actual travel, and so it’s all online meetings all the time.  However, I do frivol around with zoom a lot and I hope that people will contact me for meetings and talks if interested. 

I will be participating online at the SPSP pre-conference on extremism in Feb 2022.  At UQ, I’ll be teaching third year stats in S1 and Attitudes and Social Cognition (a third year elective) in S2. With colleagues, I also was successful in attracting funding for my work on trajectories of stalemates, gridlock and polarisation as well as unconventional advocates (e.g., conservative environmentalists).  The two grants are:

Professor Winnifred Louis; Professor Matthew Hornsey; Professor Kelly Fielding; Professor Emma Thomas; Professor Catherine Amiot; Professor Fathali Moghaddam (2022-2024). The psychology of gridlock: Compromise, coalitions, and radicalisation. $407,915.00
This project aims to test an innovative psychological model of collective gridlock. Using interviews, surveys, experiments, small group research, and analysis of social media data, the project aims to examine critical pathways in gridlock psychology, where opponents are locked into mutually suboptimal outcomes, unable to move forward. These pathways include the exit or self-censorship of moderates; normative pressure towards purity and refusal to compromise; tactical choices to avoid coalitions; and radicalisation. The research aims to develop novel interventions to reduce polarisation and radicalisation, and to promote compromises, which together will help society respond more nimbly and effectively to social and environmental challenges.

Dr Rebecca Colvin; Professor Winnifred Louis; Professor Kelly Fielding (2022-2024).  The effect of unconventional advocates on public support for climate policy. $432,467.00
This project aims to discover whether the presence of unconventional climate advocates in public debate can foster broad-based support for climate policy in Australia. Unconventional advocates include political conservatives, farmers, resource industry workers, and businesspeople. The project expects to generate new knowledge about the role of intersectional social identities in contentious policy debates. Expected outcomes of this project include evidence-based insights on how to reduce social division about climate policy. This should provide significant benefits such as guidance for policy actors for how to overcome social cleavages to implement climate policy, with relevance to other contentious policy domains.

Super exciting! I welcome new contacts and collaborators in these areas.

Mary Lee bequest
As another source of funding, in 2022, we are finally able to acknowledge a very large bequest, more than A$1M, gifted to the Social Change Lab by Mary Lee, who passed away from cancer in 2020.  Mary was a psychologist who trained at UQ, and she was struck down in her 40s, with only a short time to grapple with her illness and mortality.  She turned to her passion to support peace, democracy, and the environment, and she selected the Social Change Lab as the primary vehicle for that legacy. 

It is an enormous honour, and of course quite unexpected, to attract such generous philanthropy.  I am proud of the work of the team, featured on our website, that caught Mary’s eye when she considered whom to entrust with her legacy.  I acknowledge and give thanks for the support of UQ, and Prof. Cindy Gallois in particular, who empowered this connection to occur.

After some thought, I have asked UQ to create an endowment fund to receive the support that Mary has bequeathed us.  The fund will result in a significant income stream to the lab every year until I retire or leave UQ, which we will be using with enthusiasm to support a wide variety of suitable projects in research, teaching, and research translation.  In addition, after my career wraps up, the endowment will be given as a perk to a new Chair (professorial appointment) in the psychology of social change, thereby ensuring that Mary’s vision will continue to support scholarship and application for decades to come.  It’s a wonderful satisfaction to know that this great work lies ahead, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it with the team.

2022 is our first year of the Social Change Lab Fund’s operation and as each project is approved, it will be advertised on the socialchangelab.net website and on the present e-list.  I look forward to reporting next year on our progress in advancing the psychology of peace, of democracy, and of the sustainable environment, with our own students and with our collaborators and partners.

Joining the lab – info for students
This year I also am open to new expressions of interest from PhD students for a 2023 start.  There is some info on working with me here. 

For honours students, in 2023 I’ll be teaching a so-called team thesis – a group of 20 students in the ‘work-integrated-placement’ stream.  To be honest I’ve little idea what that entails, except that I won’t be supervising any individual honours students for that year. 

And finally, the list of our recent papers (since 2021) is given below, and if you are interested in a copy of any of these, please do just ask.

All the best from our team,
Winnifred Louis

Publications since 2021

In Press

Chapman, C., Lizzio-Wilson, M., Mirnajafi, Z., Masser, B., & Louis, W. R. (in press).  Rage donations and demobilization: Understanding the effects of advocacy on collective giving responses.  British Journal of Social Psychology.  Accepted 18/1/22.

Gulliver, R., Fielding, K., & Louis, W. R. (in press).  An investigation into factors influencing experienced environmental volunteers’ engagement in leadership and participation behaviors. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.  AWR 1/12/21.

Gulliver, R., Star, C., Fielding, K., & Louis, W. (in press).  A systematic review of the outcomes of sustained environmental collective action.  Environmental Science & Policy.  AWR 13/1/22.

Lizzio-Wilson, M., Wibisono, S., & Louis, W. (in press).  Immigrants as Threat and Opportunity: The Australian Experience.  In F. Moghaddam & M. Hendricks (Eds.), Contemporary Immigration: Psychological Perspectives to Address Challenges and Inform Solutions.  Forthcoming from American Psychological Association.

Lizzio-Wilson, M., Mirnajafi, Z., & Louis, W. (in press).  Who we are and who we choose to help (or not): An introduction to Social Identity Theory. In M. Bal & M. Yerkes (Eds.), Solidarity and Social Justice in Contemporary Societies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Social Inequalities.  Accepted 18/7/21.

Lizzio-Wilson, M., Amiot, C., Thomas, E., & Louis, W. R. (in press).  The psychology of harm-doing.  Revised manuscript resubmitted to Wissenschaft und Frieden.  Accepted 19/1/22.

Himawan, E.M., Pohlman, A., & Louis, W. (in press). Revisiting the May 1998 Riots in Indonesia: Civilians and their untold memories.  Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs.  AWR 20/12/21.

Himawan, E.M., Pohlman, A., & Louis, W. (in press). Indonesian civilians’ attributions for anti-Chinese violence during the May 1998 riots in Indonesia.  Journal of Social and Political Psychology, in the special issue on ‘Political Psychology of Southeast Asia’, guest edited by Ali Mashuri, Idhamsyah Eka Putra and Cristina Montiel, AWR (!) 8/10/21.

Johnson, J., & Gulliver, R. (In press). Public Interest Communication. Press Book.
Thomas, E., Duncan, L., McGarty, C., Louis, W., & Smith, L. (in press).  MOBILISE: A higher-order integration of collective action to address global challenges.  In S. Nicholson & E. Pérez (Eds.), Advances in Political Psychology.  Accepted 22/1/22.

Thomas, E. F., Louis, W. R., & McGarty, C. (in press).  Collective action for social change: Individual, group and contextual factors shaping collective action and its outcomes.  In D. Osborne & C. Sibley (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology.  Accepted 1/9/20.

Wibisono, S., Louis, W., & Jetten, J. (in press). Willingness to engage in religious collective action: The role of group identification and identity fusion. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.  Accepted 27 May 2021.

2022
 
Gulliver, R., Wibisono, S., & Louis, W. R. (2022).  Rising tides and dirty coal: The environmental movement in Oceania.  In M. Grasso & M. Giugni (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Movements, pp. 123-136. Routledge Ebook ISBN 9780367855680. DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855680

2021
 
Dare, M., & Jetten, J. (2021). Preserving prosociality in the face of inequality: A role for multiple group memberships and superordinate group identification. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211015303

Durwood, L., Eisner, L., Fladeboe, K. Ji, G., Barney, S., McLaughlin, K.A., Olson, K.R. (2021). Social Support and Internalizing Psychopathology in Transgender Youth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01391-y .

Eisner, L., Hässler, T., Turner-Zwinkels, F., & Settersten, R. (2021). Perceptions of Intolerant Norms Both Facilitate and Inhibit Collective Action Among Sexual Minorities. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211024335

Gulliver, R., Ferguson, J. L. (2021). The Advocates: Women Within the Australian Environmental Movement. Melbourne University Press.

Gulliver, R.G., Fielding, K. S., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  Assessing the mobilization potential of environmental advocacy communication. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 74.  DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101563 .  Published online February 2021.

Gulliver, R.G., Fielding, K. S., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  Civil Resistance Against Climate Change.  International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict: Washington, DC.  Published online September 2021. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Civil-Resistance-Against-Climate-Change.pdf

Gulliver, R., Wibisono, S., Fielding, K., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  The Psychology of Effective Activism.  Cambridge University Press, Elements in Applied Social Psychology series. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108975476 .

Himawan, E.M., Pohlman, A., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  Memahami dinamika psikologis individu yang turut terlibat dalam kerusuhan massa Mei 1998: Sebuah kerangka psikologis [Understanding the psychological dynamics of individuals involved in the May 1998 mass riots: A psychological framework].  Jurnal Psikologi Ulayat: Indonesian Journal of Indigenous Psychology.  Published online 21 October 2021. DOI: 10.24854/jpu464 p-ISSN

Kadhim, N., Amiot, C., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  The buffering role of social norms for unhealthy eating before, during, and after the Christmas holidays: A longitudinal study.  Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/gdn0000179

Lee, M., Johnson, D., Tanjitpiyanond, M., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  It’s habit, not toxicity, driving hours spent in DOTA 2. Entertainment Computing.  Published online December 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2021.100472

Lizzio-Wilson, M., Thomas, E. F., Louis, W. R., Wilcockson, B., Amiot, C. E., Moghaddam, F. M., McGarty, C. (2021).  How collective action failure shapes group heterogeneity and engagement in conventional and radical action over time.  Psychological Science.  Published online April 2021 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797620970562

Louis, W. R., Lizzio-Wilson, M., Cibich, M., McGarty, C.E., Thomas, E.F., Amiot, C.E., Weber, N., Rhee, J. J., Davies, G., Rach, T., Goh, S., McMaster, Z., Muldoon, O. T., Howe, N. M., & Moghaddam, F. (2021). Failure leads protest movements to support more radical tactics.  Social Psychology and Personality Science. Published online 7/9/21. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211037296 .

Louis, W. R., Cila, J., Townshend, E., Chonu, G.K., & Lalonde, R. N. (2021).  Religious norms, norm conflict, and religious identification.  Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Published online 24 June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000428

Minto, K., Masser, B. M., & Louis, W. R. (2021).  Lay understandings of the structure of Intimate Partner Violence in relationships: An analysis of behavioral clustering patterns.  Journal of Interpersonal Violence.  Published online 22/1/21.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520986276

Neville, F., Templeton, A., Smith, J. R., & Louis, W. (2021).  Social norms, social identities and the COVID-19 pandemic: Theory and recommendations.  Social & Personality Psychology Compass.  Accepted 10/3/21.  Published online early view https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12596 April 2021.

Selvanathan, H. P., & Leidner, B. (2021). Normalization of the Alt-Right: How perceived prevalence and acceptability of the Alt-Right is linked to public attitudes. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13684302211017633. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211017633 

Thai, M., Lizzio-Wilson, M., & Selvanathan, H. P. (2021). Public perceptions of prejudice research: The double-edged sword faced by marginalized group researchers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 104181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104181

Thomas, E., McGarty, C., Louis, W., Wenzel, M., Bury, S., & Woodyatt, L. (2021).  It’s about time? Distinct emotions predict unique trajectories of solidarity-based collective action to support people in developing countries.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1-12.  Published online October 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211047083 .

Zúñiga, C., Louis, W., Asún, R., Ascencio, C. (2021). The Chilean transition: Achievements, shortcomings and consequences for the current democracy.  In L. Taylor & W. Lopez (Eds.), Transitioning to Peace: Contributions of Peace Psychology around the World.  Published online, Springer Press. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-77688-6_8 .
 
PsyCorona collaboration
Mula, S., Di Santo, D., Resta, E., Bakhtiari, F., Baldner, C., Molinario, E., ... & Leander, N. P. (2022). Concern with COVID-19 pandemic threat and attitudes towards immigrants: The mediating effect of the desire for tightness. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 3, 100028. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666622721000216

Nisa, C. F., Bélanger, J. J., Faller, D. G., Buttrick, N. R., Mierau, J. O., Austin, M. M., ... & Leander, N. P. (2021). Lives versus Livelihoods? Perceived economic risk has a stronger association with support for COVID-19 preventive measures than perceived health risk. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-12. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-88314-4

Resta, E., Mula, S., Baldner, C., Di Santo, D., Agostini, M., Bélanger, J. J., ... & Leander, N. P. (2021). ‘We are all in the same boat’: How societal discontent affects intention to help during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/casp.2572

​Stroebe, W., vanDellen, M. R., Abakoumkin, G., Lemay Jr, E. P., Schiavone, W. M., Agostini, M., ... & Leander, N. P. (2021). Politicization of COVID-19 health-protective behaviors in the United States: Longitudinal and cross-national evidence. PLoS One, 16(10), e0256740. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0256740

This post is a departure from our usual blog format of short pieces about research and practice in our group: it's a personal reflection (from Winnifred Louis) on Donald Taylor as a person, and his scholarship and influence.

I was a masters student with Don starting in 1994, when I wrote a thesis on reactions to gender discrimination at McGill University.  I then went on to complete my PhD with him from 1996, looking at reactions to English-French conflict in Quebec.  He generously involved me in projects and papers on attitudes to immigrants in South Africa and heritage language retention in Quebec, and we worked together on a paper on responses to 9/11, and then on responses to terrorism.  After I graduated, he cheered me on and welcomed my students’ visits.  He passed away from cancer last month, in November 2021. I can’t possibly express how much I love the guy and what he meant to me, but here is a short list of some of the key things that come to mind.

Autonomous students.  Like all Don’s students I worked on projects close to my heart and my interests, I didn’t build an empire for him.  He used to laugh at people who would take credit for their students’ work and say, “good supervision is when you set it up for students to steal *your* ideas!”.  Students would come in rambling and riffing, and he’d point them to the relevant literatures and send them off to forage, then when they came back, distill their chaotic learnings into hypotheses and a sound research design, and loop them to repeat, as they developed “their” project.  Don loved the diverse research that this approach brought to him.  And when the PhD students finished, he set them up to develop new collaborations, so they could establish themselves as independent scholars, instead of milking their PhD, not matter how successful it was. “If I couldn’t totally change my research focus every seven years I wouldn’t be here,” he said. 

Incredible hulk. Don was a guy who was broad-shouldered and beefy, a football and hockey player at the varsity level.  His fashion sense was erratic - in our first meetings, I was alarmed by his 70s style, with shirt open to mid chest, and gold chains nestling in his chest hair.  I thought this must mean he was terribly sexist – and some of his unsavory comments didn’t help allay that fear, talking about how the girls chased the players on varsity teams, or how he and a friend in grad school had planned to start a university so they could fool around with the undergrad girls. He used to wear an Australian Akubra cowboy hat and oilskins - he liked the look - and signed an email to me in 2020 with a smiling emoji wearing a cowboy hat.  Even in our last ftf meeting, when he was in his late 70s, he turned up in his Akubra, and told me with glee how he’d been captured by the cult of cross-fit, referring to himself as a gym-jockey.  But what I quickly learned was that for all this flamboyance - he loved attention, he loved sports, he loved physical challenges – Don was very far from the stereotypes of toxic masculinity, insensitive or domineering.  Instead, he was a gentle and often a humble person.  The more shy and powerless the other person, the more Don was respectful and kind, quick to self-deprecate or joke, hunching down and tilting his head, attentively listening and learning.

Support for square pegs.  The transition from football scholarship to academic research saw Don scrape over class barriers that were very much alive in the 1950s and 1960s.  Maybe that was why he was always ready to support square pegs to work their way into the system.  Anyone who battled their way through was liable to find him ready to hold the door open into his lab – female students, or people from minority ethnic groups, at times when that was still unusual at McGill. Refugees from Iran and Rwanda.  Myself as a lesbian, at a time when I didn’t know anyone at all, in all of academic psychology, who was openly gay.  Quirky characters with narrow focus, and people raging against the system.  He savoured the diversity and the joyfulness of people whooshing out the doors of his lab with skills and drive.  “You’ve got to launch them!,” he said to me on mentoring grad students.  “You don’t just churn them out, you launch them!”

Passion for teaching.  At the same time Don loved and respected undergraduate teaching. Famously he never missed a class in his 40+ years of undergrad teaching, even the day after a hockey game where he had 20 stitches to his face. “You will influence many more people through your teaching than through your research,” he used to say to me and others.  He would teach huge classes of 700, but always remembered to see the students as individual people.  He would discard the scheduled lecture content to respond to climactic events, like 9/11.  He would talk to students and he would listen to them. 

I used to fear public speaking tremendously myself, to the point of blushing, trembling, and cracking voice, complete overwhelm.  “You feel fear as a teacher when you are thinking about yourself,” he said to me kindly.  “Try to think about your students instead - how much you want them to learn what you’re saying.  Think about the content, and how much you love the content, and why you care!”  Good advice - he was an excellent public speaker.

“You’ve got to live for the anecdote!,” he used to say.  Don was also a story-teller who would mercilessly blow the time limits of his talks, and of his classes, in order to digress to stories that made people laugh, think and act differently.  But he was also someone who, in his everyday life and his career, would turn to go down less travelled paths, stop to hear from unexpected people, and choose something strange and different whenever the choice was offered.  “Live for the anecdote!,” he would say.  Don’t get stuck in a rut.  Don’t pass by the opportunity that won’t come again.  Live with panache!

Make a difference!  Don’s career was impressive in many respects, but perhaps most unusual in showing his long-term commitment to sweeping social change around the world. For five years as a PhD student, I flew up annually on seven-seater planes to Kangiqsujuaq, a tiny village in Arctic Quebec, 100s of kilometers above the treeline.  I was part of a 30 year rotating team of students and RAs who learned about the North and contributed to research co-designed with Indigenous Inuit communities on language, identity, and social attitudes.  Another time, with Don, I contributed to a special issue in memory of William Robinson, a language scholar who was retiring, and who lamented that at the close of his career he was disappointed that he had not overthrown the class system in the UK.  Don and I laughed – but Don applauded that he had never lowered his sights.  “They just don’t get it!,” Don used to say irritably, skimming the latest incremental, trivial study, or self-focused theoretical micro-dispute. The world was full of huge problems, with real people struggling - *these* problems needed attention and theorising. The big problems, the big picture – his students were always pushed to consider how our research fit into these categories.  Moving beyond the WEIRD context before it was labelled as such, Don introduced me and dozens of other students and collaborators to challenges facing disadvantaged communities, and encouraged us to study them – by going there, by being there, by listening, by working with them, by following their agendas.  He supported scholars from the disadvantaged communities and in the global south, and amplified their voices and their theorising.

Pragmatism and sober-minded clarity.  He was woke before there was wokeness, but at the same time, he would never have presumed that others would feel the same way, or waste time being surprised if others rejected those values.  Don was always really clear about the academia that we worked in as not valuing social change or positive benefits to communities, and even being hostile to them.  Maybe that’s not true now in some cases – I hope so.  But I still teach my students what Don taught me in the 1990s.  He said, you need two lines of research: a mainstream one using mainstream methods published in mainstream journals – this will get you your job, tenure and promotion.  It will get you grants. The other work, your applied work, you have to be ready to have dismissed.  It has to be for the benefit of communities, so it may be slower, or grind to a halt, or blow apart due to politics.  Maybe there will be no academic outcomes for years, or at all. Publication may be relegated to journals and conferences that powerful gatekeepers don’t care about at all, or even see as harmful.  (In my own career, a former Head of School, which is like a department chair, once remarked, “If you’re going to publish in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, why publish at all?”)  So you have to do both mainstream and applied work, to secure your future, Don would say.  You have to publish.  But it’s not *just* about job security.  Applied work will make you a better theoretician, Don said – more alive to complexity, more aware of received wisdom that’s not actually true.  Go outside the box.  Look back from the outside.  And also: theorising and experiments will strengthen your contribution to application – they will help to untangle causality. And they will credential you to go out to communities and speak to policy makers.

Money matters. In the same pragmatic vein, Don was always keenly aware that money matters.  He learned from Wally Lambert, a social psychologist at McGill famous for his research and his own memorable stories of cheap-skatedness, to never stay at conference hotels, as being too expensive and a ripoff to the taxpayer.  Over the course of his career, Don used to reflect with smugness, he’d directed thousands of dollars from his grants towards research participants and RAs, by staying in shared rooms at hostels when he travelled, or with friends, instead of living it up in luxury.  He loved the vibe as well – or at least, male graduate students and RAs that’d shared with him brought back stories of Don sitting around in his boxers playing the guitar, and late nights talking theory and drinking beer. More nefariously, in his later career Don used to sneak into conferences to give his research talks without paying to register for them – something that puzzled and exasperated the conference organising teams, often made up of his former students and friends.  “These are ridiculously expensive,” he said at one point when I asked him about it - I guess he decided other student and research expenses were more worthy.  It’s a choice he felt was legitimate for him to make, which tells you a lot about him.

Bend the rules and make them work for you.  Don understood the importance of institutions, and cultivated relationships with policy-makers for immigration, language, and race relations carefully all his career.  He also kept a vigilant eye on university politics. But he despised bureaucracy and institutional politicking.  So he was always ready to bend the rules.  He helped set up courses at McGill for Inuttitut education that effectively became offered in intensives, creating a path that allowed Inuit students to credential themselves as teachers with less difficulty.  “What kind of names are these?,” the Dean asked him in bewilderment at one point, peering at the -iaq and -miq graduands – unexpected lists of names ending in q and k.  Don used to laugh happily to us as he recalled getting the system to work for the students this way.  Look for ways to make what you want to do fit a label the system can live with.  Look the authorities in the eye and smile blandly.  Hold the door open to let others through.

Human at work.  All of these things influenced me, and they help me now, and my students too, but the thing that speaks most loudly to my heart now is that long before the term was fashionable, Don was ‘human at work’ – he was authentic and real, and not just defined by his job.  He spoke to us about his family, and he asked about mine.  He came to my wedding.  He played music, and sports, and coached kids’ sports, and took time off for holidays with his wife and kids – and he encouraged us to do the same: take time off for other things.  Be real. Have friends and family.  “It’s different now,” we used to say to him – we grad students of the 1990s – “it’s too competitive, you’ve got to work all the time and stack up publications, you can’t get by and take weekends off”. “I worry that’s true,” he used to say. But work expands to fill the time you give it. Have the best career you can, within the boundaries you set.

Don had a great career.  He won national awards for teaching, for research, and for service.  He was also deeply loved, as much as anyone else I know or more so.  At a symposium we had in honour of Don at the Canadian Psychological Association conference in 2016, people came from all over the world to celebrate his influence and research.  I came myself from Australia. He was utterly astonished – he was completely flabbergasted that so many people would go to so much effort to celebrate him and his work.  I will close this tribute, as I closed the talk on the day, with these words:

Thank you Don!

For tremendous support personally & professionally for more than 20 years

…For an inspiring vision of a great life filled with joyful curiosity, research, family, sports, music, and activism

…For moral indignation always translated with determination and humour into action and alliances,

…For boundless scepticism about authorities and bureaucracy, but tremendous faith in teaching, science, and possibilities,

… And for highlighting the value of living for the anecdote !
 
***

Other tributes to Don for those who knew him or are curious:

In his own words

• Part 1 https://youtu.be/tBRt1RjaJck and 2 https://youtu.be/bthIZemm0HU of a long interview with Don by Richard Lalonde as part of oral histories of social psychology in Canada – to enjoy spending the time with him
• Don’s ‘Papa Don’ speech at the 2016 conference (shows his personality) https://www.dropbox.com/s/snkdppy26uz1k13/Video%20of%20Don%20Taylor%20in%202016.MOV?dl=0

Others’ words

• From McGill: https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/people-0/faculty-0/memoriam-donald-taylor
• Facebook thread of community responses https://www.facebook.com/McGillPsychologyDept/posts/1746787842172370
• Obituary in The Globe and Mail https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/theglobeandmail/name/donald-taylor-obituary?pid=200565094
• Family obituary https://www.evergreencremationcentre.com/obituary/Donald-TAYLOR​

What are the key ingredients for successfully developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals? What’s required for a team to successfully work together at the proposal development stage?
Here we provide seven lessons based on our experience, divided into:

• team characteristics
• structuring the grant proposal writing process.

Team characteristics
Lesson 1: Invite a mix of new blood and established experience.
It is useful to have team members at various stages of their careers, as well as researchers who have worked together previously and those who have never met before. It can work well to have clusters of researchers who have worked intensively within the cluster, but who are new to each other across clusters.

Lesson 2: Foster convergence readiness.
Prior experience in cross-disciplinary collaboration can enhance the dynamics of preparing a proposal by combining deep expertise in a discipline with the ability to see how the pieces fit together.

Lesson 3: Encourage open questioning.
One of the main difficulties with cross-disciplinary collaboration is the longer runway required for takeoff. It takes time to understand other disciplines and develop trusting relationships. This involves listening generously and asking a lot of questions. In addition, specialized disciplinary languages do not translate across all fields, so plain language is needed.
To achieve such an environment, we recruit team members with confidence but without big egos. Confidence engenders the security needed to be vulnerable and ask questions, as well as to be comfortable in the unknown. On the other hand, big egos can result in repression of other team members’ perspectives.

Structuring the grant proposal writing process

Lesson 4: Use a mixture of ways to communicate and work together.
Big group conversations are important for coherence, but small working groups are more effective at getting things done. Share the ideas generated in small groups with regular updates and survey questions. In addition, cross-pollinate with boundary-spanners across teams, who may be the leaders of the sub-teams, or individuals liaising across two or more sub-teams.

Further, actively weave together thinking and writing. While it can be tempting (and easy) to spend a lot of time talking with each other, writing is a powerful way of communicating and brings much needed clarity to the thinking process.

Lesson 5: Shift the academic culture.
The collaboration-driven convergence culture stands in sharp contrast to traditional academic culture mired in competition and silos. Researchers need to recognize the interdependence between their success, their colleagues’ success, and the success of the overall research team.

Women have an important role to play in shifting the academic culture and fostering collaboration, sharing, and connecting.

Lesson 6: Allow plenty of time for team development.
Teams need time to form, storm, norm, and finally perform. Take into account the fact that everyone has multiple obligations to juggle, as well as needing downtime at the end of the year and for vacations.

Lesson 7: Plan for research implementation and broader impact.
Key to research making a difference is long-term partnerships with those who are likely to use the research. For instance, research seeking to contribute to racial equity will only be effective if the researchers already have relevant long-term partnerships, for example with minority-serving institutions.

Conclusion
This blog post is based on our recent experience developing a proposal for the US National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Regional Systems-Research Networks solicitation. Our five-year $15 million project involved ten academic institutes, with a wide spectrum of disciplines, and 30 other stakeholder groups including state and city governments, non-governmental organizations, and industry partners.

What have your experiences been with developing proposals for large-scale cross-disciplinary research projects? What lessons have you have learnt? What roses (strengths), buds (potential) and thorns (challenges) could you share with the community?

  - By Gemma Jiang, Jin Wen, and Simi Hoque

This post was previously published on the Integration and Implementation Insights Blog

Biography: Gemma Jiang PhD is the Founding Director of the Organizational Innovation Lab in the Swanson School of Engineering, as well as the founding host of the Pitt u.lab hub and the Adaptive Space at the University of Pittsburgh in the USA. She applies complexity leadership theory, social network analysis, and a suite of facilitation methods to enable transdisciplinary teams to converge upon solutions for challenges of societal importance.

Biography: Jin Wen PhD is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. She has about twenty-years of experience in the sustainable building field and has taken several leadership roles in directing large scale collaborative research projects.

Biography: Simi Hoque PhD is an associate professor in Architectural Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. Her expertise is in sustainable building design and computational modeling to characterize urban resilience. She is deeply invested in promoting women and girls in engineering.

The recent spate of attacks on Asian Americans in cities around the United States has reinforced the popular belief that bystanders seldom intervene to help strangers, especially in densely populated urban areas. But is that belief correct?

Bystanders Do Not Stand By
A study published last year in the highly regarded journal American Psychologist found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, intervention is the norm in public conflicts. Research psychologist Richard Philpot at Lancaster University and his colleagues examined closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage of 219 public quarrels and attacks (Philpot et al., 2020). The incidents occurred on the street in the entertainment and central business districts of three cities: Amsterdam (the largest city in the Netherlands), Cape Town (the largest city in South Africa), and Lancaster (a smaller city in northwest England).

Philpot and his team trained four research assistants to count the number of bystanders at each incident and determine if one or more bystanders intervened in the public conflict. The conflicts ranged from animated disagreements to brutal attacks; the interventions ranged from calming gestures and separating individuals to physically pulling an attacker away from his victim. The assistants almost always agreed with each other when making their judgments.

In the footage of one incident, for example, a man can be seen beating another man who is down on the ground. Four persons are nearby when the attack begins. One bystander, a man, moves to pull the attacker away from his target. Another bystander, a woman, steps between the attacker and his victim, extending her arms to keep them at a distance from each other.

In their analysis, the researchers determined that at least one bystander intervened to help in 91 percent of the incidents. In fact, usually more than one person intervened; the average number of interveners per incident was 3.76.

More Bystanders Means More Intervention
The number of bystanders at the scene was positively associated, in a statistical sense, with the overall likelihood that someone would intervene. Specifically, the odds that a victim would receive help increased by 10 percent with each additional bystander. (The old adage "there's safety in numbers" takes on new meaning.)

The pattern of interventions did not differ significantly across the three cities. Victims in Cape Town were as likely to receive help as victims in Amsterdam or Lancaster. (Interestingly, perceptions of public safety are considerably lower in Cape Town than in Amsterdam and Lancaster, which serves as a helpful reminder that our perceptions of reality do not always correspond with reality itself.)

The researchers noted that their study had certain limitations. First, because the videos did not have an audio track, the coders were not able to record verbal interventions such as "calm down" or "I'm calling the police." The total number of interventions may have been higher than what was seen on the CCTV footage.

Second, the quarrels and attacks occurred in urban districts that had many restaurants, bars, and clubs. Some bystanders may have been tipsy from drinking alcohol, which could have affected their assessment of the risks involved. That is, some bystanders may have helped because they weren't thinking clearly about the potential dangers associated with intervening in a violent attack. If that was the case, then rates of helping might be somewhat lower in shopping and residential districts.

Citizens Are Prepared to "Self-Police" Public Conflicts
The researchers also considered the policy implications of their findings. Many of the bystanders in their study were willing to intervene and tried to de-escalate a hostile situation before police arrived. It seems that, in at least some circumstances, citizens are prepared to "self-police" public conflicts - an observation that has interesting implications for policing strategies and law enforcement budgets.

According to Philpot's study, intervention is the rule, not the exception, in public conflicts. "We found that in nine-out-of-ten conflicts at least one person - but typically several - did something to help" (Philpot et al., 2020, p. 71). And that, my friends, is what we call good news.

  - by Professor Emeritus Lawrence T. White

This post was previously published on the Psychology Today blog.

Lawrence T. White, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Beloit College in Wisconsin.


For Further Reading
Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Levine, M., Bernasco, W., & Lindegaard, M. R. (2020). Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts. American Psychologist, 75, 66-75.

Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future burst onto the world stage in 2018 to demand urgent action on the climate crisis. These movements organized strikes, blockades and demonstrations, building on the work of activists before them.

But how frequently do climate activists use civil resistance? How do they sustain their campaign and organizing despite various challenges and repressive responses by the opponents and their allies? And what has civil resistance against climate change been able to achieve?

In a forthcoming ICNC Monograph, we use data collected on hundreds of Australian climate change groups and campaigns to examine these questions. This data demonstrates impressive levels of activity: 729 Australian groups organized 27,934 events from 2010 to 2019, of which 3,705 involved civil resistance tactics. Rallies were the most popular (1,872), but activists also organized occupations, die-ins, strikes and bicycle swarms, among others. We also analyzed the outcomes of 193 campaigns against climate change organized by these groups, which targeted businesses, governments, health and education providers and individuals. Eighty campaigns were linked to a successful outcome, such as overturning punitive fees for solar panel owners and securing a political commitment to close a coal fired power station.

Our rich dataset has become a portal into the successes and shortcomings of nonviolent resistance for environmental change in Australia. One of those successes highlighted in our study is the Stop Adani campaign. This campaign merits its own storytelling so that other campaigns and activists elsewhere might benefit from and utilize some of its key learnings.

Lessons from the Stop Adani campaign

The Stop Adani campaign aims to halt the construction of a large thermal coal mine located in Central Queensland. Since its proposal in 2010, it has generated widespread public outrage despite ongoing political support for the development.

More than 250 environmental groups have participated in the campaign since its inception, using tactics as diverse as film screenings, nationwide ‘Stop Adani’ human signs, disruption of the 200-year celebration of the bank proposing to fund the mine, and the development of a permanent blockade camp to facilitate civil resistance actions along the proposed mine, port and railway infrastructure corridors.

Despite 11 years of activism, the mine is now under construction. Its progress however has been marred by delays, cost overruns and legal challenges as a result of the ongoing campaign. At the same time, the environmental activism sector in Australia has endured political crackdowns on the use of civil resistance tactics and attacks on the charitable status of environmental organizations.

How has the campaign been able to persist and achieve successes despite these challenges? Our research identified three characteristics of the Stop Adani campaign which may help explain its power.


‘Directed network’ campaigns can sustain, support and diversify climate activism

The Stop Adani campaign uses a directed network structure, where a central, professional hub supports volunteer-based grassroots groups across the country working on the campaign. The centralized team focuses on strategy, development of campaign information materials, and relationship building with corporate and political powerholders.

This innovative structure has supported the emergence of over 120 local Stop Adani groups, while also enabling groups to specialize in different tactical approaches. Some groups, for example, have specialized in political lobbying, while other groups use civil resistance tactics to stop work developing the mine and its associated infrastructure.


Diversified targeting can enable small, achievable wins even in the face of larger failure

The Stop Adani campaign ultimately seeks to stop the construction of the new coal mine. However, the campaign has successfully targeted many other organizations that either support or enable the mine to conduct its work, such as banks, insurance companies, contractors, local authorities and the state and federal governments. This strategy has enabled the campaign to achieve inspiring successes even while the mine continues to be built.

In our analysis we tracked the number of campaign events and their targets between 2016 and 2019. After the ‘Big 4’ Australian banks ruled out funding the mine in 2017, increased targeting against federal and state governments occurred in the election periods. By 2019, mine contractors, insurance companies and infrastructure providers were targeted with a range of tactics including protests, blockades and sit-ins. One after the other they have cancelled their associations with the mine. Today, no major Australian bank or private investor will back the project.

Networking helps sustain grassroots civil resistance

Our data suggest that many of the grassroots climate action groups which were formed independently have struggled to survive. Whereas campaigns using a directed network structure, such as Stop Adani, Extinction Rebellion and the Divestment campaign have been able to weather the financial, legal and psychological challenges of sustaining their actions while also pushing back against vested interests.

Networking between groups using different advocacy and civil resistance strategies has enabled efficient use of skills and resources. For example, groups have worked together to develop and sustain the ‘Camp Binbee’ blockade site for over three years. With support from a number of large Australian environmental NGOs, some groups have won complex legal cases against the mine while others have provided detailed financial research to attack the financial structures that support fossil fuel demand. Networking has enabled environmental groups to combine their resources to increase their power to create change.


The future of civil resistance against climate change

More than 30 years after Australians first used civil resistance tactics to demand climate action, the crisis has continued to escalate. Yet changing political realities and sustained, resilient activism against entrenched fossil fuel interests offer hope for the future. Directed network campaigns such as Stop Adani have helped build power across the environmental activism network and mobilized larger numbers of volunteers to engage in civil resistance. Activists are supported by specialist training and resource development organizations such as The Commons Social Change Library and The Change Agency. Organizing continues both offline and online even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our monograph suggests that the vibrant, diverse climate civil resistance ecosystem in Australia is succeeding, and invites similar analyses from around the world to inform advocacy and mobilization to effectively protect our environment. Time will tell whether this is sufficient to avert the worst of what awaits ahead.

  - by Robyn Gulliver, Kelly Fielding and Winnifred R. Louis


This post was previously published on the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict: Minds of the Movement blog.


Dr Robyn Gulliver is a multi-award winning environmentalist, writer and researcher who has served as an organiser and leader of numerous local and national environmental organisations. Her research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of environmental and pro-democracy activism.

Professor Kelly Fielding is an environmental psychologist at the University of Queensland whose research focuses on developing ways to promoting environmental attitudes and actions. She addresses a range of environmental issues including climate change communication and action.

Professor Winnifred R. Louis (PhD McGill, 2001) is a Professor in Psychology at the University of Queensland. Her research interests focus on the influence of identity and norms on social decision-making.

Trust and legitimacy are vital components of disseminating research beyond academia, which is increasingly being encouraged and indeed expected of Early Career Researchers (ECRs). This advice section was written by two ECRs who have focussed on different ways of engaging with audiences outside of academia. One of us (Zoe) has engaged with government and non-government organisations to improve health and wellbeing of people experiencing social disadvantage, such as homelessness. The other (Hema) has worked closely with community groups on collective action in Malaysia and disseminated research to activists, civil society leaders, and the general public audience. Below, we share with you five points of advice, based on our learnings so far.

1.    Know your audience
It is really important to get to know and understand who it is that you want to engage with your research. Ask yourself: What is the purpose of your research? How do want your research to have an impact? Who will benefit from your research findings (e.g., policy makers, clinical populations, members of government, non-governmental organisations)?

Once you have thought about these questions, start building relationships that allow you to engage with your target audience. Being open about your wants while simultaneously listening to their concerns is key to developing trust and legitimacy. Building a partnership based on mutual respect becomes crucial to ensuring that your research is not only reaching your target audience but also relevant and responsive to their needs. Once you have an understanding of their needs, you can formulate a strategy that communicates a clear message in an appropriate format that aligns with those needs. 

2.    Engage the community in the process 
People are not passive recipients of knowledge. It is essential to invite your audience to engage with the research process and your findings so that the community becomes co-creators of knowledge. This form of communication can be done from the beginning of the research project and allows for collaboration with your audience. Further, beyond publication in a scientific paper, knowing that participants’ responses will be used for an important purpose or address a real-world need, can be a way to empower participants.

To navigate these spaces, it is important to constantly negotiate your identity and clarify your position. As an academic, you are not always trusted. Community members can be sceptical about your goals (and for good reason – there is a long history of researchers “using” people to advance the scientific agenda). Research priorities do not always match the priorities of community groups – however to truly have an impact, it is important to find ways to address the needs of community group in future endeavours. 

3.    Know how to effectively communicate research
In presenting my (Hema’s) research to a room of activists and NGOs leaders in Malaysia, I had a few slides of regression graphs – this was a silly mistake. It was not only irrelevant but also made the presentation less interesting and relatable to the group. 

Think from the perspective of what your audience will find most important or helpful, rather than what you want to say. If engaging with a non-academic audience, avoid jargon and focus on the questions the audience is interested in. Think about ways you can effectively communicate your key take-away points. This can include more traditional styles like visual aids and presentations, forums and meetings, written reports and summaries, and engaging with the media. Remember that we live in the digital age; there are many opportunities to engage with others on social media, blogs, and personal websites. 

It takes practice to get good at disseminating your research – so put yourself out there. For example, we also wrote opinion pieces and have been interviewed on radio stations – these opportunities were sought out by submitting a pitch to several media outlets. Needless to say, I never spoke about regression analyses again!

4.    Recognise what’s holding you back
It can be a daunting process to start disseminating research in non-academic outlets, particularly for ECRs. In addition to not knowing when or how to start, you are opening your research up to public debate and criticism (which reading the comments sections of articles can attest to). 

Although I (Zoe) have spent a significant portion of my time in meetings with community partners, writing reports and recommendations for policy and practice, as well as discussing and implementing changes in services, I still feel like an “imposter” when discussing my research. One of the lessons I learnt is that I needed to overcome not feeling like an “expert” so I could share findings and implement evidence-based practice. 

An important part of that is also knowing you don’t have to have all the answers. For example, one of the things activists and civil society leaders wanted to know from me (Hema) was what they can do better. How can they mobilize more people? What strategy was effective and what could backfire? Unfortunately, the answers are not simple or clear. However, these experiences pushed us to ask research questions that would get closer to answering these questions. 

5.    Build your profile and start now!
While there is an increased focus on engagement and the ‘real world impact’ of research, how to do this and the immediate benefits of research dissemination beyond academia are not always clear. However, the legitimacy of research is increased when we disseminate widely the knowledge that people have invested in, and by disseminating more broadly, that research has more potential to be meaningful. 

Now more than ever, we are able to use a range of different approaches to broadcast our research to the wider community. Build yourself a public profile that increases your legitimacy and trustfulness. This includes maintaining an online presence via social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), researcher identifiers (e.g., ORCID), academic social networks (e.g., ResearchGate), and personal or professional websites (e.g., your researcher profile at your institution). 

Hopefully this article has provided some insights into this process and we wish you all the best in your endeavours!


 - By Dr Zoe Walter and Dr Hema Preya Selvanathan

This post was previously published on the International Society for Political Psychology, Early Career Committee Newsletter.

Between 2012 and 2016, at least 50 individuals from the Belgian neighborhood of Molenbeek abandoned their home to join the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria. This rate of defection to a radical cause from one small Western European community was unprecedented. The problems the residents of Molenbeek were facing—lack of employment, education, and general incivility—are not uncommon in other neighborhoods. So, what makes this neighborhood so different?

Addressing this question, our team decided to understand the impact of these neighborhoods in light of three psychological forces called the 3Ns: Need, Narrative, and Network.

Need
The need refers to people need to feel valued. When a universal need is severely frustrated, people are strongly motivated to restore it. Feeling humiliated or experiencing social injustices can cause feelings of insignificance. Identifying a quest or cause can help people restore their need for significance. Interviews conducted by the European Institute of Peace (EIP) reflect this loss of significance in Molenbeek. For instance, one neighbor said that “if you have an Arab name and Molenbeek as the address listed on your CV, you are automatically disqualified from the job market.” Others expressed hopelessness that significance could be found through traditional means, saying that they “simply don’t see the opportunities. Why would one pursue education if it doesn’t help?”

Narrative
The narrative consists of perceptions about what is significant to those around them. In particular, do they think others endorse the use of violence to achieve significance? Or do these “narratives” promote nonviolent solutions? Reflecting this point, one interviewee pointed to ‘pseudo mosques’ as integral to feeding narratives of violence or nonviolence. One interviewee mentioned that outsiders “don’t know what is going on in the mosques, parks, and coffee shops.” Another added that “at a certain point, ‘pseudo mosques’ start the day with the intent to preach radicalism.”

Network
Finally, the network unites the need and the narrative. The people we value are the ones who will support or reject the violent narrative. They are the ones who matter most when people determine what is meaningful and what are acceptable means to significance. In this vein, an interviewee, speaking about the Muslim community in Molenbeek, commented that “they feel empowered among themselves and don’t want to open up to other communities” indicating the dependence on the neighborhood for support. Other interviewees suggest that some youth turn to violence in “an attempt to conform to an older brother or group of friends.”

In sum, when a person suffers a loss of significance, a need to regain significance is awakened. This need leads the person to focus on their group or neighborhood’s narratives to guide their mission to regain significance. When the individual then shares that narrative with friends or family, the extent to which their network endorses violence as the only means of achieving significance determines the ultimate use of violence.

Young Muslims in Spain
Applying this model, we conducted field research in four settings in Spain, assessing different risk and protective factors outlined by the 3Ns. Our research on 365 young Muslims showed that the most vulnerable environments—those exhibiting high rates of unmet needs for significance, widespread violent narratives, and social network support for violence as a mean for significance—led to a higher perception of conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims and enhanced endorsement of terrorism as legitimate. In contrast, their beliefs that they could successfully integrate into society were diminished.

Based on these findings, we believe preventing radicalization requires interventions tackling these forces. These could include addressing social inequities that contribute to feelings of insignificance. Or lifting community voices that advocate prosocial means to meeting the need for significance. Or challenging the perceived social norms about how much one’s friends and family actually believe violence to be the answer. Different narratives are out there, if we can get people to listen.

  - By Roberto Lobato, Manuel Moyano, Jocelyn Belanger, & Humberto Trujillo

Roberto M. Lobato is project manager and researcher at the Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies (Spain). His research focuses on social identity, processes of radicalization, political violence, and terrorism.
Manuel Moyano is Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cordoba (Spain). The areas of his works focus on psychosocial risk assessment, psychology of conflict and intergroup relations, psychology of violent radicalization and terrorism, forensic, and criminal psychology.
Jocelyn J. Bélanger is Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University Abu Dhabi. His work focuses on violent extremism and environmental sustainability.
Humberto Trujillo is Full Professor of Methodology for Behavioural Sciences at the University of Granada (Spain). His research is broadly concerned with indoctrination and recruitment in terrorist context and the relationships between criminality and political violence.

This post was previously published on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; Character and Context Blog


For Further Reading
EIP (2017). Molenbeek and violent radicalisation: ‘a social mapping.’ European Institute of Peace (EIP), Brussels.

Kruglanski, A. W., Bélanger, J. J., & Gunaratna, R. (2019). The three pillars of radicalization: Needs, narratives, and networks. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190851125.001.0001

Lobato, R. M., Moyano, M., Bélanger, J. J., & Trujillo, H. M. (2021). The role of vulnerable environments in support for homegrown terrorism: Fieldwork using the 3N model. Aggressive behavior, 47(1), 50-57. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21933

How do legislators use science? It’s not an easy question for scientists to answer. Many are hard pressed to identify even one concrete example of an evidence-based legislative action. So, we sat down with policymakers to ask them the same question. What we heard will surprise those who are pessimistic that science is used at all in policymaking. We now can identify several ways that research flows, much like a river, through the policy landscape.

First, we reached out to 123 state legislators in Indiana and Wisconsin. These legislators then nominated an additional 32 colleagues who they felt were exemplary research users. We also supplemented our sample with 13 key policy players (such as governors, heads of lobbying firms, former legislators). Confidence in our findings can be inspired by the high response rates in the hard-to-access population of policymakers (60%, 84%, and 100% respectively).

When Research is a Hard Sell
We learned there are policies and people and places that can frustrate and facilitate research use. First, regarding policies, research was less likely to hold sway on polarized moral issues, such as reproductive rights. Research was generally less influential on issues driven by ideology, such as beliefs about whether government is the problem or the solution. There was little room for research on issues driven by passion, such as tragic personal stories. As one Republican relayed, “If a bill is named after somebody . . . like Sarah’s Bill, then you know research is screwed.”

Where Research Can Have an Impact      
Policymakers turned to research more frequently on emerging issues such as opioid use, concussions, and rural Internet availability. Research also was more likely to influence issues where policymakers did not have established positions or where consensus had been reached, such as with the need for  criminal justice reform. Research also appeared to flow more freely on the “million . . . technical issues . . . that’s really the majority of the [legislature’s] work.” One Republican, who worked on property tax assessment and land annexation, said technical issues don’t get a lot of media attention but still comprise about 80% of the policy agenda:

“There’s no quote ‘Republican or Democratic’ theory about them and there’s no big contributor to your campaign who cares. . . It’s just like you’re stripping it down to the essence of good government. . . I think you have . . . much more ability to govern in sort of an evidence-based way.”

Who Seeks Science
However, research use varies by people. Some legislators told us they rely on intuition or gut instinct, whereas others factor in research. As an example, legislators face hundreds of bills each session, which makes it literally impossible to read and study each one. So, legislators specialize and develop expertise on a particular issue. They become known as the “go-to” legislator, whom colleagues turn to for advice on what positions to take. To attain and maintain a reputation as an issue expert, they often use in-depth research. Also, members of the minority party more often turn to research evidence; the “minority party has to win more of its arguments based upon facts” because it lacks access to other levers of power.

Right Place, Right Time
Timing also mattered. Research more often is used early on in the policy process when the issue is still a work in progress and policymakers have not yet staked out a position. Where the research was introduced also mattered. The most expertise on specific issues lies in committees, where bills are developed before hitting the floor.

Regardless of the time or place, research is used in a political sphere where decisions are reached through negotiation. So, for policy purposes, the utility of research depends not only on its credibility to allies, but also to adversaries. Policymakers screen the credibility of research less by the methods and more by the source, particularly the source’s reputation as reliable and nonpartisan. Despite its value, policymakers believe that nonpartisan research is difficult to find.

To understand research use in policymaking, we must think like a river. Policy issues infused with morality, ideology, or passion flow through narrow, nonnegotiable routes that restrict research use. However, research can navigate the policy landscape on issues that are new, technical, or open to consensus. Research use is facilitated when it enters through the port of a committee and frustrated when it enters downstream where it hits the rapids of unrelenting time pressures. To guide next steps, policymakers provided practical advice to those interested in communicating research to them. Legislators also identified multiple ways that research contributes to their effectiveness as policymakers and to the policy process. See the works listed below for more about these recommendations.


  - By Karen Bogenschneider & Bret N. Bogenschneider

Karen Bogenschneider is a Rothermel-Bascom professor emeritus of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her expertise is the study, teaching, and practice of evidence-based family policy. She is known for her work on the Family Impact Seminars, and is co-author of a forthcoming second edition of Evidence Based Policymaking: Envisioning a New Era of Theory, Research, and Practice.

Bret N. Bogenschneider is an assistant professor of business law in the Luter School of Business at Christopher Newport University.  His expertise is in tax law and policy, and he is author of the recently released How America was Tricked on Tax Policy. 

This post is previously published on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; Character and Context Blog

For Further Reading
Bogenschneider, K., & Bogenschneider, B. N. (2020). Empirical evidence from state legislators: How, when, and who uses research. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 26(4) 413-424. https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000232

Bogenschneider, K., Day, E., & Parrott, E. (2019). Revisiting theory on research use: Turning to policymakers for fresh insights. American Psychologist, 74(7), 778–793. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000460

We all know that in this modern time there are more PhD graduates than academic job positions. Additionally, being an academic may not be an ideal job for everyone. With a PhD degree, there are in fact plenty of professional job opportunities in the market available. Having said that, you have to keep in mind that in the industry market, you are competing with many more applicants. To make yourself and your CV outstanding, you not only need to communicate to potential employers who are not necessarily familiar with the metrics of academia, but also you need to translate your research and academic skillsets into more applied settings. Here I am going to share some of the strategies I have learnt that I believe helped me get my job:

Stay prepared!
Job opportunities can come to you at any time. By ‘being prepared’ I mean you need to keep your documents up to date, especially your CV. You should start to think of and connect with your job referees, and ask for their permission to provide their names and contact details in advance if you can. Don’t forget to keep them informed if you do provide their names for a job application. Also, in this day and age people tend to do online background checks together with reference checks. Thus, remember to check your privacy settings and remove negative posts or comments from your social media networks. A quick google of yourself is a good way to see what prospective employers might find. Finally, in industry you may get a call for an interview at short notice (1-2 days). Therefore, it is important to do your own research about presenting well in a job interview, especially a panel interview.  The academic job talk is not a common practice, so you won’t be in your comfort zone giving a prepared talk about your research.

Be fast
Many companies will not wait until the last day of the application period to shortlist candidates. Often, they do it on a first come first serve basis. To save time and energy, I normally only go for professional jobs that have been recently posted (less than 2 weeks).  To avoid missing opportunities, make sure you search for jobs regularly. Search for jobs using multiple job search engines and make sure to check the actual application close date from the company’s original website, as some search engines will keep renewing closed job ads until the listing is cancelled. LinkedIn can be good for making connections and keeping up with job postings in industries of interest; however, its popularity may vary by location and industry.

Keep your options open
Apart from ordinary ways of applying for a job (i.e., through websites, or head hunters/agencies), recruitment by reference is also popular, particularly in Asia. This means you are recommended by one of the company’s staff to apply for an available job position. You are more likely to get interviewed through the reference provided by the employee, though this does not guarantee that you will get the job.

CV: The Pathway to a Job Interview
In industry, you need to make your CV stand out from those of potentially hundreds of other applicants! On average, recruiters spend about 6 seconds to decide to look at your CV (or toss it).

Remember, keep your CV short! Show your official name and short title, including email but not home address. You will want to keep your CV to a maximum of 2-3 pages.

Customize your CV to the position you apply for. I advise against sending out the same CV for every job post. You don’t need to re-write the whole CV but only include relevant experiences in a CV. This is in contrast to the norms in academia. Industry recruiters hate long CVs.

Pay attention to details because good employers will look for this. Additionally, it is common for recruiters of big companies to scan applications for key words from an advertised job description. Therefore, if your CV contains key words mentioned in the job ad and industry, it’s more likely to be seen.

Work experience is very important! In academia, hiring professors may look for your publications and education first, but industry people are interested in what you can DO. Make your work experience interesting by using action words that suggest leadership and initiative (leading a team, overseeing, etc.). The trick is to use concrete figures when describing your previous roles - e.g., leading a team of 20 university tutors, 25% increase in teaching satisfaction scores. You can show off your soft skills here through mentioning what you did in the previous jobs and how you solved work-related problems. Most importantly, don’t forget to list work achievements for every relevant job you did in the past. Depending on the nature of the job you’re applying for, sometimes you may need to separate academic work experience (teaching, research) from professional work experience.

Detailed research activities are not a must (unless you are looking for a job in public or university sectors). You will need to select just a few of your top papers to highlight and if you wish, you can provide more detailed research activities in a separate file for anyone interested. Rewards/scholarships/grants can be included in a CV, but they are just to show how great you are – sadly, many professional folks do not know much about research grants or funding, or they do not care. Remember to also include in a CV your ‘hard skills’, and be specific – e.g., instead of saying ‘statistical analysis’ or ‘programming’, do specify types of analyses or programming languages that you know.

Performing Well in a Job Interview
In the industry, you may be interviewed in multiple rounds by different persons. HR tends to focus on how you can fit in the company regarding your background, including your attitudes and values. Always do your homework about the company background beforehand. They are unlikely to discuss salary at this stage.
Questions about research are also unlikely to be of interest. Line managers tend to focus more on skillsets. Whether questions are specific or not, you must give action-specific answers. Tell them what you did in the past, what you achieved during previous roles, how you solved work- or people-related problems, etc.. Don’t worry about repeating your CV, most line managers may just skim through your CV and expect you to sell yourself during the interview. Tips: The common first question ‘tell me about yourself’ is the first step to impress your interviewers. The actual question here is to ‘tell me what you are good at’ not ‘tell me your life story’, so frame your answers to show your expertise that is relevant to the job and to the company.

Lastly, nowadays most interviews are online due to COVID. Get yourself familiar with talking in front of the camera. Properly set up lighting, camera angle, and background. Practice and test your voice before the interview. Also, be aware of your face and eye movements!

Keep at it
In industry, as in academia, you may need to apply for many jobs, and participate in many interviews, before you get the one you want. Expect a long and difficult process, and keep your eyes on the prize at the end: the job that is waiting for you. You only need one!

  - By Gi Chonu

This blog post aims to summarise the 12 tips provided for early career scholars on having policy impact on our policy page.  That page distils the genius of three impactful social psychologists and includes links to lengthy interviews with them on a range of topics.  The featured researchers are: community and clinical psychologist Eleanor Wertheim (LaTrobe university), environmental psychologist Kelly Fielding (University of Queensland), and cross-cultural psychologist James Liu (Massey University).  The short version is:

1. Join Networks and Teams
A central point that all three scholars made is not to imagine you can do it alone - teams are more impactful.  Try to find people with like-minded passions, and try to find people with an established track record as mentors, Eleanor Wertheim advises.  In general, international collaborations are more impactful.  James Liu adds: seek to be part of a team or system – e.g., look for internships – you can't be out there alone.

In an ideal world you might even consider policy networking before you choose your PhD advisor.  Have they a record of making a difference, of disseminating research?  Don't just look for publications.  But even if your PhD research ends up as part of a narrower discovery-oriented vision, you can also start to look around for additional role models and mentors during your PhD and as an Early Career Researcher. 

Opportunities come up to join networks and teams on professional e-lists and as you start to make yourself known at conferences and through publications.  A critical point is that if you see an invitation to a meeting, as Kelly Fielding advises, turn up! Go to the meetings, sit down, be friendly, be open, and be excited - show enthusiasm.  This is how you signal to others that you are a like-minded person that could be part of an ongoing network.

2. Plan and Learn
A closely related point is that like “doing great research”, “having policy impact” requires planning and lots of acquired skills and knowledge.  Think about what difference you want to make in the world - aside from career and reputation, what difference will you make?  If you already know a general area you want to contribute to, plan for this. Research and join organisations and interest groups. You should also be aware of who is working in the field and approach them to introduce yourself and explain your interests.  Think of being in a global network: follow people on Twitter, follow them on google scholar, and join the e-lists of the major NGOs and Institutes that work on the issues you care about.

3. Seize opportunities
While research has a long term horizon and discovery (blue sky) research is slow, policy changes happen in fits and starts.  Often opportunities only open for change in a country for a window or moment.  You will need to learn from your mentors what the state of play is in your area, and what part of the policy cycle people are in.  It is a lot easier to spot chances for leverage or learn about needs as part of a network than on your own.

Relatedly, you will need to look not just at what you’re interested in, but what government and funding bodies and inquiries and policy-makers are interested in.  Think of how you can find common ground.  But don’t just think alone – as James Liu says, get advice from your mentors about how to position your research.  You will want to practice with mentors how to frame a pitch in terms of what you can bring to particular industry, NGO, or government audiences.

Do more
Policy impact is not a metric that feeds into getting a job in academia, and it doesn’t help you to get promoted or tenured.  It is possible that a policy focus during your PhD could help you to get a job in industry or government, but seek advice if this is your aim – often times that type of job is few and far between.  Winnifred Louis advises, to reduce risks in your academic career, you might aim for one line of work that is more predictable, mainstream, and published using methods other high status people in your department/ discipline recognise and value, and in journals people recognise and value.  Ticking the boxes in that mainstream area allows you to take on policy work, which has uncertain timelines, controversial topics, mixed methods or under-valued methods, and may go to under-valued journals, or be disseminated in totally different formats (e.g., like websites or workshops) that others discount or see as ‘unscientific’.

So, with that caveat in mind, if you’re interested in policy work, ignore the advice to focus narrowly during your PhD.  That advice is designed to make sure you get publications and finish, but you will take responsibility to do the former while also jumping at the chance to work with people from different disciplines and outside of academia.  Seek to develop pluralistic methods – learn both qualitative and quantitative approaches, etc..
 
Dealing with conflict and negative feedback
Search for impact can bring you into contact with difficult personalities, and into arenas of passionate, bitter conflict between parties with different interests and values.  There is no easy solution to this, but you can seek to become self-reflective about your own interests and values, and to upskill on conflict and change for individuals, groups, and societies. 

Another important point is that much like research and academia in general, in policy work you generally encounter a very high rate of negative feedback. This is especially true early on in your career. You’ll want to practice getting used to the heat of the kitchen – people telling you what you are doing wrong is not a sign that you are failing, it’s a sign that you’re doing challenging work that not everyone values or understands, plus you have a steep learning curve to climb.  Mentoring and peer support can help to get over the heavy ground when it all seems too much.
 
Manage your expectations and sustain your motivation
A related point is that policy changes happen in fits and starts, and like research, a lot of projects fizzle and fail.  So go in with low expectations – outreach increases your chance of impact, but there are no guarantees.  James Liu adds, it’s important to understand that you can't control a situation when you are out there in the field – the rigor of the research can be compromised, but this may open you up for insight.  You have to be flexible, and be responsive to community needs. Community-engaged and policy-relevant research rarely goes as you planned. It’s a great adventure that keeps you growing as a person.

In summary, advice to keep your motivation during times of crushing disappointment includes having a long-term focus, sharing social support with like-minded people, having a growth mindset where you focus on learning and progress not outcomes alone, and having a values mindset where your focus is on how you can do what you can to enact your values with the opportunities that are available.  And finally, recognising with humility that there are many factors that you do not control: you’ll need this skill repeatedly, and it will greatly improve your well-being.

  - By Winnifred Louis

Domestic or partner abuse is a pervasive problem in our society, and in Australia is almost universally recognised as such. Although there is a near consensus acknowledgement that domestic abuse is harmful and should not be tolerated, there seems to be less consensus on what people see, or don’t see as abuse. Given that challenging abusive behaviours first requires the recognition of abuse, this highlights a need to understand how people’s concepts of abuse might help or hinder their identification of abuse in intimate partner relationships.

Prior research has shown that people are uncertain about whether non-physically abusive behaviours are abuse. Most would agree that a person who uses a weapon against or beats their partner is guilty of abuse, but it is well known that in many relationships in which abuse occurs the individual behaviours do not reflect these overt forms of physical abuse. In fact, many abusive relationships are characterised by harmful behaviours that are non-physical in nature (e.g., accusations of flirting). This is particularly true in the early stages of an abusive relationship where subtle, non-physically abusive behaviours are typical. However, it is important to note that whilst individual behaviours may appear relatively minor, this does not negate the considerable harm these behaviours can cause. This is largely due to a key discrepancy between abuse and other crimes. Domestic abuse differs from many other crimes (e.g., theft) in that the harm is cumulative, caused by multiple incidents over an extended period, rather than a single incident at a single point in time. Consequently, the harm caused by each incident builds on the harm caused by each prior incident.

In my research I wanted to explore people’s concepts of what partner abuse looks like to gain insight into how they might perceive early abusive behaviours. Specifically, I wished to determine the types of behaviours they might expect to see together, and whether previously observed differences in judgements of non-physically and physically abusive behaviours persist when people are presented with multiple behaviours rather than a single incident.

What we did?
In our study, participants were presented with two non-abusive behaviour exemplars (A agrees to try B’s solution [to an argument or problem]; A shows they care about B), two non-physically abusive exemplars (A accuses B of flirting; A shouts at B), and two physically abusive exemplars (A grabs B; A slaps B). For each exemplar behaviour, participants were also presented with a list of behaviours which depicted non-abusive, non-physically abusive, and physically abusive behaviours. They were then asked to select up to four behaviours they thought likely to occur in a relationship where the exemplar behaviour was present. After creating each of these six behavioural clusters, participants were asked to indicate whether they would judge a relationship where the exemplar and their clustered behaviours were present to be abusive, possibly abusive, or not abusive.

What we found?
Broadly our results indicated that participants expected similar types of behaviours to cooccur. Participants were most likely to select non-abusive behaviours to cluster with non-abusive exemplars, non-physically abusive behaviours to cluster with non-physically abusive exemplars, and physically abusive behaviours to cluster with physically abusive exemplars. Even when judging clusters with multiple abusive behaviours, participants were less certain in the identification of abuse when presented with clusters of non-physically abusive behaviours than when presented with clusters of physically abusive behaviours.

An additional interesting finding was that although non-physically abusive behaviours were most likely to be chosen for both non-physically abusive exemplars, there were distinct themes present in the two non-physically abusive exemplar clusters. The behaviours most frequently clustered with the flirting exemplar seemed to reflect a theme of controlling and monitoring behaviours, with non-abusive and physically abusive behaviours similarly unlikely to be selected. In contrast, the behaviours most frequently clustered with the shouting exemplar reflected a theme of toxic conflict with physically abusive behaviours more likely to be selected than non-abusive behaviours. Participants viewed the flirting exemplar clusters as less clear evidence of abuse than the toxic conflict clusters.

What might it mean?
Broadly these results suggest that participants expect similar types of behaviours to cooccur.  Interpreted in light of the abusiveness ratings, the results also suggest a hesitancy or uncertainty in the identification of non-physically abusive behaviours as abuse, even when multiple behaviours are presented simultaneously. This was particularly true of controlling behaviours linked to the flirting accusation exemplar. Given that early abusive behaviours are typically non-physical, these findings suggest efforts to combat the occurrence of domestic abuse in the early stages may be undermined by a persistent failure to recognise non-physically abusive behaviours as abuse, a failure that is particularly pronounced when the behaviours align with narratives of jealousy.   

 - By Kiara Minto

For Further Reading
Minto, K., Masser, B., & Louis, W. (2021). Lay Understandings of the Structure of Intimate Partner Violence in Relationships: An Analysis of Behavioral Clustering Patterns. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 088626052098627. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520986276

 Incidents of racial discrimination are all too common, but only recently have such incidents been highly publicized and shared widely on social media. Here are some examples:

• At Yale University, a White student called the police, stating that a Black woman she did not know was sleeping in the common room of her dormitory. Actually, the Black woman was one of her neighbors.
  

• A White employee at Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police when she saw two Black men sitting at a table without ordering anything. The men reported that they were simply waiting for their friend, and witnesses said the men did nothing wrong; still, the police escorted these men out in handcuffs.
  

• In Central Park, a White woman called the police after a Black birdwatcher just asked her to keep her dog on a leash in the park. She made a second call claiming he tried to assault her.
  

Being largely unaware of the pervasive discrimination faced by Black people and other minoritized groups in the U.S., White people have had often felt little need to do anything about it. Indeed, only a small proportion of White Americans have protested for racial justice, and those who do take action typically report close ties with people from racial and ethnic minority groups.

But as millions witnessed the brutal killing of George Floyd while in police custody, we have seen more White people taking to the streets than ever before to protest for racial justice. Thanks in part to social media, White people are beginning to recognize everyday racial profiling and the severity of racial discrimination, and as a result, they are becoming more aware of the White privilege they enjoy.

We surveyed nearly 600 White Americans to ask how often they have witnessed an incident of racial discrimination targeting Black people in their day-to-day lives—for example, a Black person being treated differently than other people would be treated at restaurants or stores. We also asked about their awareness of racial privilege and their willingness to take action for racial justice and equality, such as protesting on the streets and attending meetings related to Black Lives Matter protests.

Whites’ reported willingness to take action for racial justice was quite low. But the more frequently White people witnessed racial discrimination, the more willing they said they were to take action against racial injustice—and this effect was largely due to their greater awareness of racial privilege.

In our next study, we focused on White people who described themselves as “allies” in the pursuit of racial justice, and who had previously taken at least some action to promote racial justice. Once again, we found the more frequently White people witnessed racial discrimination targeting Black people, the more they became aware of racial privilege, and this, in turn, predicted their greater willingness to take action against racial injustice.

We next tested experimentally whether exposure to incidents of racial discrimination would lead White Americans to become more aware of racial privilege and more willing to protest for racial justice. Half the participants viewed videos depicting well-publicized incidents of racial discrimination such as described earlier, while the other half viewed only neutral images. Results showed that White participants who viewed the discriminatory incidents reported greater awareness of racial privilege and tended to become more motivated to take action for racial justice.

It thus seems that greater awareness of racial privilege can grow from witnessing incidents of racial discrimination indirectly, such as through videos on social media and news reports, without being personally present at such events. These results offer hope that further steps toward racial justice may be taken as White people become more aware of both racial discrimination and their own racial privilege—and, in turn, become more motivated to take action against racial injustice.

 - By Özden Melis Uluğ & Linda R. Tropp

Özden Melis Uluğ is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

Linda R. Tropp is a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This post is previously published on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; Character and Context Blog

For Further Reading
Case, K. A. (2012). Discovering the privilege of whiteness: White women’s reflections on anti-racist identity and ally behavior. Journal of Social Issues, 68(1), 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2011.01737.x

Tropp, L. R., & Uluğ, Ö. M. (2019). Are White women showing up for racial justice? Intergroup contact, closeness to people targeted by prejudice, and collective action. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 43(3), 335-347. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319840269
Uluğ, Ö. M., & Tropp, L. R. (2020). Witnessing racial discrimination shapes collective action for racial justice: Enhancing awareness of privilege among advantaged groups. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12731

 
I want to start, as usual, by acknowledging our group’s successes:

In 2020, the lab saw Robyn Gulliver and Gi Chonu awarded their PhD theses - whoohoo! Susilo Wibisono, Zahra Mirnajafi, and Kiara Minto also submitted their theses for review, so woohoo! in advance. J Well done everyone! 

For their next steps, Susilo and Kiara are still canvassing their options; Robyn is about to start a post doc on collective action at HKU with Christian Chan; Zahra is going to take up a one year post doc on volunteer organisations in Iran with Jolanda Jetten; and Gi has secured a stats teaching gig at the Singapore campus of James Cook Uni, after moving to Singapore with her family (in the middle of a pandemic!).  Well done all round! 

While we are sorry to see her go, we are delighted to say that Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, who has been a post doc on the collective action grant and voluntary assisted dying grants in 2020, has been offered a two year post doc at Flinders with Emma Thomas.  What a wonderful opportunity! Well done Morgana!  She will be moving to Adelaide in March. 

Meanwhile, we also welcomed to the lab (virtually) Leila Eisner, who secured a post doc from the Swiss government to work with me on norms and collective action. She has unfortunately been prevented from moving to Brisbane in person due to COVID.  Here is hoping that the development of vaccines will re-permit international travel and scholarship later this year … but in the mean time, we welcome Leila to our meetings when the time difference permits!

2020 also saw many other students working through their other milestones, including Gi, Zahra, Kiara, Susilo, and Robyn who finished their thesis reviews (and in fact, as mentioned above, submitted!).  Eunike Mutiara was confirmed successfully after her first year on a project in genocide studies with Annie Pohlman in the School of Languages and Cultures at UQ and me.  Hannibal, Liberty and Robin are moving into their final year, and so is Tulsi (who has a final two years due to working part time). 

I also want to pass on a special thank you to our volunteers and visitors for the social change lab in 2019, including Ruby Green, Hema Selvanathan, Jo Brown, Mai Tanjitpiyanond, Lily Davidson, Celeste Walsh, Raine Vickers-Jones, and Peter Benton, along with our summer scholars Mina Fu, Madeleine Hersey, and Zoe Gath.  Thank you everyone!  And here’s hoping that 2021 is equally fun and social, as well as healthy, happy and productive for us and for the group!
 
Other news of 2020 engagement and impact

We had our normal collective plethora of journal articles (see our publications page) but of course conferences this year were greatly affected by COVID.  Due to COVID, I missed out on my sabbatical visits to Indonesia, Chile, New Zealand, and the USA, and I have now restarted teaching.  However, I did get to participate in and listen to a variety of fun Zoom forums.  The lab organised an interesting symposium online on The Social Psychology of Violence and I gave an online keynote address to the International Zoo Educators’ (IZE) annual conference in October 2020. 

As part of the COVID pandemic, I developed some new resources online (listed here).  I also joined an immense research project, https://psycorona.org/ .  It was an incredible lesson in the possibilities for collaboration and agile research, and I am sure that the harvest will be reaped by scholars for many years to come.

In regards to pubs, I was excited in 2020 by finally getting this theory piece out, which in addition to other very fun riffing, at last published the DIME model formally.  The first empirical paper was also finally accepted in Psychological Science – whoohoo! It is still not out though, and the other major DIME paper is still working its way through the process of being rejected excruciatingly slowly by all the best journals. :)

In other news, our lab has continued to work to develop open science practices in 2020 and to establish consistency in pre-registration, online data sharing, transparency regarding analyses, and commitment to open access.  I think for us as for the field, progress is steady!

Socialchangelab.net in 2021

Within the lab, Kiara Minto has been working to solicit, edit, and publish the blog posts, and to encourage creation and updating of our pages.  Thank you Kiara for all your great work last year with our inhouse writers, our guest bloggers, and the site! 

We continue to welcome each new reader of the blogs and the lab with enthusiasm, and if you have ideas for guest blogging, by all means contact me to discuss them.

I also am still active for work on Twitter, and I hope that you will follow @WlouisUQ and @socialchangelab if you are on Twitter yourself.  In 2020 we also started a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/The-Social-Change-Lab-research-by-Winnifred-Louis-and-team-109966340687649/ .  I am still getting the hang of it, but I invite those of you who are still on fb to consider following the page.

Looking ahead, I am working with the IZE association to develop some cool online content around my ‘effective environmental communication’ talks.  Although this may end up being behind a pay wall for zoo educators, I look forward to seeing how the professionals do it.  This is because I am also working (particularly with the assistance of Robyn Gulliver) to develop some new content that will be available to all, in a project to download my brain to the internet. What could go wrong? ;)

What the new year holds:

In 2021, at the moment I have no plans for actual travel, and so it’s all online meetings all the time.  However, I do frivol around with zoom a lot and I hope that people will contact me for meetings and talks if interested. 

I will be participating online at the SPSP conference with a data blitz sessions and in a symposium led by Ana Leal.  At UQ, I’ll be teaching third year stats and Applied Social Psychology (a fourth year elective) in S1 and S2 respectively, which I really look forward to.  I am also presently trying to develop new lines of work and grant apps on trajectories of stalemates, gridlock and polarisation.  I welcome new riffing and contacts on any of these.  I have some big grant apps out with colleagues but who knows if any can proceed.

This year I also am open to new expressions of interest from honours students and PhD students.  While my primary focus is still on writing and working through my backlog of data, I’ll be considering new students in 2021.  There is some info on working with me here.

A list of our 2020 papers is given below, and if you are interested in a copy of any of these, please do just ask.

All the best from our team,

Winnifred Louis

Asún, R. A., Rdz-Navarro, K., Zúñiga, C. & Louis, W. (2020). Modelling the mediating effect of multiple emotions in a cycle of territorial protests. Social Movement Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2020.1867093 .  Published online 30 December 2020.

Amiot, C. E., Lizzio-Wilson, M., Louis, W. R., & Thomas, E. F. (2020).  Bringing together humanistic and intergroup perspectives to build a model of internalisation of normative social harm-doing.  European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(3), 485-504. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2659.

Chapman, C. M., Masser, B. M., & Louis, W. R. (2020). Identity motives in charitable giving: Explanations for charity preferences from a global donor survey. Psychology & Marketing, 37, 1277-1291.  DOI: 10.1002/mar.21362.

Fielding, K. S., & Louis, W. R. (2020).  The role of social norms in communicating about climate change.  In D. C. Holmes & L. M. Richardson (Eds.), Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change, pp. 106-115.  Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

González, R., Álvarez, B., Manzi, J., Varela, M., Frigolett, C., Livingstone, A., Louis, W., Carvacho, H., Castro, D., Cheyre, M., Cornejo, M., Jiménez-Moya, G., Rocha, C., Valdenegro, D. (2020).  The role of family in the intergenerational transmission of collective action.  Social Psychological and Personality Science.  Published online 19/8/20 https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620949378 .

Hornsey, M. J., Chapman, C. M., Mangan, H., La Macchia, S., & Gillespie, N. (2020). The moral disillusionment model of organizational transgressions: Ethical transgressions trigger more negative reactions from consumers when committed by nonprofits. Journal of Business Ethics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-020-04492-7

Kahdim, N., Amiot, C., & Louis, W. R. (2020).  Applying the Self-Determination Theory continuum to unhealthy eating: Consequences on well-being and behavioral frequency.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 50(7), 381-393. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12667 .

Lantos, D., Lau, Y. H., Louis, W., & Molenberghs, P. (2020). The neural mechanisms of threat and reconciliation efforts between Muslims and Non-Muslims. Social Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2020.1754287

Louis, W. R., Thomas, E. F., McGarty, C., Lizzio-Wilson, M., Amiot, C., & Moghaddam, F. M. (2020). The volatility of collective action: Theoretical analysis and empirical data.  Political Psychology. Published online 23 June 2020 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12671?af=R .

Minto, K., Masser, B. M., & Louis, W. R. (2020).  Identifying non-physical intimate partner violence in relationships: the role of beliefs and schemas.  Journal of Interpersonal Violence.  Published online 10/7/20.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520938505

Selvanathan, H. P., Lickel, B., & Dasgupta, N. (2020). An integrative framework on the impact of allies: How identity‐based needs influence intergroup solidarity and social movements. European Journal of Social Psychology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2697

Collective action is a key process through which people try to achieve social change (e.g., School Strike 4 Climate, Black Lives Matter) or to defend the status quo. Members of social movements use a range of conventional tactics (like petitions and rallies) and radical tactics (like blockades and violence) in pursuit of their goals. In this blog post, we’re writing to introduce DIME, which seeks to model activists’ divergence in tactics. The theoretical model is published in an article on “The volatility of collective action: Theoretical analysis and empirical data”, published online here in Advances in Political Psychology. 
 
The model is named after a dime, which is a small ten cent coin in some Western currencies. In English the expressions to “stop on a dime” and “turn on a dime” both communicate an abrupt change of direction or speed. With the DIME model (Figure 1; adapted from Louis et al., 2020, p. 60), our goal was to consider the volatility of collective action, and to put forward the idea that failure diversifies social movements because the collective actors diverge onto distinct and mutually contradictory trajectories.
 
Specifically, the DIME model proposes that after success collective actors generally persist in the original tactics.  After failure, however, some actors would Disidentify (losing commitment and ultimately leaving a group).  Others would seek to Innovate, leading to trajectories away from the failing tactics that could include radicalisation and deradicalisation.  And a third group might double down on their pre-existing attitudes and actions, showing Moralisation, greater moral urgency and conviction, and Energisation, a desire to ramp up the pace and intensity of the existing tactics.
 

We think these responses can all co-occur, but since they are to some extent contradictory (particularly disidentification and moralization/energization), the patterns are often masked within any one sample.  They can be teased apart using person-centered analyses that look for groups of respondents with different associations among variables.  Another approach could be comparing different types of participants (like people who are more and less committed to a cause) where based on past work we would expect that all three of the responses might emerge as distinct.
 
The disidentification trajectory – getting demotivated and dropping out – has been understudied in collective action, and for groups more broadly (but see Blackwood & Louis, 2012; Becker & Tausch, 2014).  A major task for leaders and committed activists is to try to reduce the likelihood of others’ disidentification by creating narratives that sustain commitment to the group in the face of failure.  Inexperienced activists, those with high expectations of efficacy, and those with lower levels of identification with the cause may all be more likely to follow a disidentification or exit path.  Some that drop out, furthermore, may develop hostility towards the cause they left behind.  A challenge for the movement therefore is to manage the bitterness and burnout of former members.
 
The moralization/energization path is likely to be the default path for those who were more committed to the group.  In the face of obstacles, these group members will ramp up their commitment.  But for how long?  Attributions regarding the reason for the failure of the initial action are likely to influence the duration of persistence, we suspect: those with beliefs that the movement can grow and would be more effective if it grew may stay committed for a longer time, for example.  In contrast, attributions that failures are due to decision-makers’ corruption or opponents’ intractability may lay the groundwork for taking an innovation pathway.  A challenge for the leadership and movement is to understand the reasons for the movement failures as they occur, and to communicate accurate and motivating theories of change that sustain mobilisation.
 
Finally, the innovation path as we conceive it may lead from conventional to radical action (radicalisation), or from radical back to conventional (deradicalisation).  It may also lead away from political action altogether, towards more internally focused solidarity and support for ingroup members, or towards movements of creative truth-telling and art. There may be individual difference factors that promote this pathway, but it is also a direction where leadership and contestation of the group’s norms would normally take place, as group members dispute whether the innovation is called for and what new forms of action the group should support.
 
The DIME model aims to answer the call to theorise about the volatility of collective action and the dynamic changes that so clearly occur.  It also contributes to a growing body of work that is exploring the nature of radicalisation and deradicalisation.  We look forward to engaging with other scholars who have a vision of work in this space.

 - By Professor Winnifred Louis

Recently, some states in Australia have begun considering the implementation of a law criminalising coercive control. Similar laws were recently introduced in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. So what should you know about the criminalisation of coercive control?

1. What is coercive control?
Although the behaviours that constitute coercive control have long been recognised by researchers in domestic abuse, the term coercive control was first coined by Evan Stark in 2007. Coercive control covers a wide range of behaviours used to dominate and control the victim including:

• Financial abuse
• Monitoring
• Isolation
• Degradation and humiliation

These behaviours are ongoing, with abusers typically using multiple tactics.  The ways in which these behaviours present are ever changing. Monitoring behaviours in particular is keeping pace with our technological landscape, as social media, and phones make surveillance easier than ever before. Humiliation through technology has also become a major issue with the phenomenon of ‘revenge porn’. Regardless of the specific behaviours, a common thread of coercive control behaviours is that they are repetitive and used instrumentally by the abuser, consciously or not, to shape the behaviour of the victim into what the abuser wants.

2. Why do supporters want to criminalise coercive control?
Given the pervasive nature of these sorts of abuse, it is perhaps unsurprising that many would like to see these behaviours criminalised. As the law in Australia currently stands, many coercive control behaviours can be very difficult to prosecute. Because the system currently takes an episodic approach to domestic violence and abuse, and relies on an intent to cause harm, individual incidents need to be viewed as intentionally harmful criminal events in order for the court system to charge the offender. However, this approach has limitations.

Firstly, unlike most crimes (e.g., theft) domestic abuse is cumulative. This means that a seemingly minor individual incident might be harmful when experienced as part of a pattern of ongoing behaviours. Often it is the repeated victimisation that causes lasting harm. Additionally, some abusers may not intend to cause harm but simply believe that their victim’s behaviour needs to be altered. This belief does not however, negate the harm caused.

Secondly, there are cases where a victim of abuse may resist their abuser in a verbal or physical altercation. In these cases, the incident-based approach can lead to charges being brought against the victim. Supporters of the new law argue that criminalising coercive control would allow evidence from outside of the specific incident to be brought forward, potentially protecting victims against being miscategorised as perpetrators.

Recognising what is and is not abuse is often challenging and contested. New coercive control laws would help to send a clear message that these behaviours are abusive and therefore, unacceptable.

3. Why do detractors have concerns?
If criminalising coercive control has the potential to do so much good, why are some people against this proposed law? Those opposed to criminalising coercive control have several key concerns. However, opposition generally reflects concerns regarding the implementation and application of the law rather than the spirit in which it is intended.

Firstly, there needs to be a concrete way to inform victim/survivors of the existence of the coercive control law, and how it might be of use to them. There must also be education for law enforcement officers and first responders.  Many are concerned that even if victims/survivors wish to use this law, if the offence is implemented without accompanying shifts in perspective from the first responders, law enforcement, and all others involved in the legal system, then outcomes will not change optimally for victim/survivors.

Further, without victim supportive attitudes from all those involved in the legal system, some worry that a coercive control offense will become another avenue for abusers to use the courts and the law to further their abuse. Legal cases can be a public platform for perpetrators to undermine and humiliate their victim, attacking their character, every decision they have made, and every aspect of their life. Additionally, trauma can impact memory and recall. Because of this, the person who presents the most coherent story may often be the abuser, someone typically practised in the art of manipulation. Some believe that this law runs the risk of being diverted to the prosecution of victims, particularly if the victim has resisted their abuser on several occasions.

Finally, it is important to note that the legal system is not right for everyone. Some victim/survivors may not feel that bringing a legal case against their abuser is worth the risk of possible retaliation, whilst others may simply not want to go through a court case where they will be forced to relive their trauma. It is essential that implementation of a coercive control law does not detract from other responses to abuse such as counselling programs for victims and perpetrators (whether they separate or remain together), housing assistance for victim/survivors, and support for survivors and their families to help them escape their abusers.

Closing thoughts
Criminalising coercive control has potential to be a step in the right direction. However, any attempts to implement such a law should be carefully considered, with every effort made that the implementation of criminalising coercive control benefits victims. 

To learn more about coercive control, you can access resources here and here.

  -  By Kiara Minto

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that there is a crisis of confidence in the charity sector. In recent years a series of high-profile scandals have rocked the sector, including the Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal and the suicide of an elderly British donor Olive Cooke, who had received an estimated 3,000 charity appeals in the year before her death.
 
Scholars, practitioners, and the media have lamented falling trust in charities and worried about the ramifications for the nonprofit sector. Trust is known to be an essential ingredient for fundraising success. Drops in charity confidence could therefore threaten the survival of the sector as a whole.
 
My colleagues and I study charity scandals and trust in nonprofits. Through a series of experiments, we have demonstrated that scandals emerging within nonprofits have dire consequences for transgressing organizations. In fact, nonprofits lose trust and consumer support at faster rates after a scandal than commercial organizations do.
 
It’s clear that scandals damage trust in particular organizations. But do highly publicized scandals also damage trust in the sector as a whole?
 
To answer this question, we accessed global data collected as part of the Edelman Trust Barometer. Each year, Edelman survey people around the word and ask, among other things, how much they “trust NGOs in general to do what is right”. Edelman shared data from 294,176 people in 31 countries over a period of 9 consecutive years.
 
We analyzed these data in a way that had not been done before. Specifically, we looked at trust trends after taking into account individual differences (i.e., the fact that some kinds of people are more or less trusting) and country differences (i.e. the fact that some countries are generally more or less trusting and that different countries may show different trust trends over time).
 
Spoiler: There is no global crisis of trust in nonprofits
 
Our analysis shows no significant decrease in trust over time. In fact, once we accounted for individual and country differences, trust in NGOs has actually increased slightly around the globe between 2011 and 2019.
 
It’s true that some people and countries show different trends. For example, the increase in trust was sharper among men, people aged under 40 years, and people with higher education, income, and media consumption. Although some countries showed small increases and some showed small decreases in trust, none of these trends was substantial in size. In other words, there is no was no evidence that trust in NGOs has changed meaningfully in any of the 31 countries over the last decade.
 
So why do the public still trust nonprofits despite the scandals?
 
The short answer is we don’t know. The data allowed us to identify if trust was changing over time but not why.
 
We have some ideas about what might be going on though. Charities, generally speaking, have reputations for being moral. We suspect that this good reputation functions as a kind of “trust bank” that buffers charities from the effects of scandals. Perhaps over time the sector makes deposits in the community trust bank through their good works in society.  When scandals emerge within individual organizations, this may draw down some of the community trust that has built up over time but have very little impact on reserves of trust in the overall sector. 
 
What does this mean for nonprofit managers?
 
If the good deeds of charities cultivate trust banks from which they can safely draw on in times of crisis—an idea that has not yet been evidenced—then a key strategy will be to ensure all successes are communicated both to the supporter base and to the wider public.  Nonprofit leaders should also encourage other organizations within the sector to do the same.  When the nonprofit sector works together to highlight their good works, the entire sector may benefit in the future when unexpected scandals erupt within the community. 

  - Dr Cassandra Chapman

***
This article was reposted with permission from the NVSQ Blog.

Read the full article:
Chapman, C. M., Hornsey, M. J., & Gillespie, N. (2020). No global crisis of trust: A longitudinal and multinational examination of public trust in nonprofits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. doi: 10.1177/0899764020962221

Which charity is most important to you? Why?
 
These are the questions we asked 1,849 people in 117 countries. We analysed their responses to note themes and trends. And we learned a lot about how identities influence charitable giving. Here are four key takeaways:
 

1. Self vs Other: people can be egoistic or altruistic
Some donors (45% of our sample) explained their giving in relation to their ‘self’, talking about their social identities (groups they belong to), values and beliefs, suffering they had experienced, or benefits they had received from the charity as motives for giving. Other donors (59%) explained their giving in relation to ‘others’, talking about the beneficiary’s identities, power, importance, or neediness.
 

2. Identities influence giving; but which ones?
People commonly named both their own identities and beneficiaries’ identities when explaining their charity preferences.
 
Content analyses of beneficiary identities revealed a strong preference for helping children, animals, and sick people. Other types of beneficiaries (e.g., the LGBTIQ community, ex-offenders) were rarely mentioned as the reason for preferring a charity. This suggests that some needy groups are more likely to be helped than others.
 
We were also able to create an inventory of the identities that donors say influence their giving choices. These were different from the identities that fundraisers may assume. The identities most commonly named by donors were based on family, geography, specific charity organisations, religion, friendship groups, and being a human. Charities may wish to make explicit connections with these kinds of identities in their fundraising appeals to help donors see a connection between the cause and one of these important identities.
 

3. Shared identities are powerful motives for giving
A significant minority of donors (around 8%) explicitly mentioned shared identities—the fact that they and the beneficiary both belonged to a group that was important to the donor. This suggests that charities that can highlight a shared identity between potential donors and the organisation’s beneficiaries will be more successful in their fundraising.
 
4. Motives depend on the beneficiary
By analysing the frequency of different motives across different types of charities, we found that donors’ motives are influenced by the beneficiaries in question. Donors were more likely to use self-oriented motives to explain their giving to medical research and religious charities. For these kinds of charities, fundraisers may wish to emphasise relevant identities, personal experiences, and benefits for the donor. On the other hand, donors were more likely to use other-oriented motives to explain giving to social welfare, animal, and international charities. For these kinds of charities, fundraisers may find more traditional empathy-based appeals to be most effective.
 
In sum, this study shows that donors have diverse motives for giving. In particular, both donor and beneficiary identities influence charity preferences. Charities must understand the identities that motivate donors to give to their particular cause or beneficiary, in order to write powerful and effective fundraising campaigns.
 
   -   Dr Cassandra Chapman
 
***
Read the full article:
Chapman, C. M., Masser, B. M., & Louis, W. R. (2020). Identity motives in charitable giving: Explanations for charity preferences from a global donor survey. Psychology & Marketing, 37(9), 1277-1291. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.2136 (or email Cassandra at [email protected] to request a copy of the article)
 

When someone helps us, gives us a gift, or wishes us well, saying “thanks” probably seems like an indisputably positive and appropriate response. In fact, research suggests that expressing gratitude has a variety of benefits.  Beyond promoting positive social interactions, expressing thanks can increase people’s well-being, strengthen relationships, and lead the thankful person to focus on their benefactor’s needs and come up with ways to return the favor. These findings have led self-help authors to strongly encourage people to cultivate gratitude on a daily basis.

However, when we turn to the role that gratitude has played in the relations between social groups, the picture is different. For example, women who protested for their right to vote and Black people who fought for racial equity in the Civil Rights era in the United States were often accused of ingratitude. Today in Europe, refugees who engage in protests are called ungrateful, and immigrants who have gained citizenship are sometimes still expected to show gratitude to the nation who receives them. These examples illustrate that disadvantaged groups have faced explicit demands to express gratitude, especially when they tried to challenge injustice. In fact, insisting that disadvantaged groups show gratitude might have served as a way to calm down protest, ensure that the groups cooperate, or make disadvantaged people acknowledge appreciation for the benefits they received—even when those “benefits” were basic human rights.

Julia Becker and I wondered whether expressing gratitude to socially-advantaged group members does, in fact, reduce disadvantaged groups’ protests against injustice. We thought that, when someone who belongs to a socially disadvantaged group—such as a lesbian woman or a black man—expresses thanks toward someone who belongs to a socially advantaged group (such as a heterosexual woman or a white man), saying “thanks” might prevent them from confronting potential discriminatory behavior from the advantaged group member. In other words, expressions of thanks might “pacify” members of socially disadvantaged groups.

We tested this idea in a series of studies conducted in Germany and the United States. The participants in these studies were members of low-power groups in various contexts. For example, some participants were employees who interacted with a manager, some were students interacting with a professor, and some were women interacting with men. In all studies, we constructed the experimental situation so that the low-power participant was treated in an unfair or offensive way by the higher power person, for example, by making a disparaging remark. Later, the high-power group member provided some kind of benefit to the participant, for example, by giving the participants the reward that he had received for participating in the study.

In some studies, participants could decide whether to express gratitude to the high-power group member, while in other studies, they were either required to express gratitude or were not allowed to express gratitude. Next, we measured how much the participants were willing to protest or object to the high-power person’s unjust behavior or the extent they actually protested (for example, by complaining about the person or confronting them directly).

Overall, low-power participants who had expressed gratitude to the high-power group member protested less than participants who had not expressed thanks. Merely expressing gratitude to an unfair high-power group member reduced participants’ willingness to stand up for themselves.

Additional analyses suggested that this “pacifying” effect occurred because expressing gratitude led the participants to forgive the higher-power person. And because forgiveness can create the impression that justice has been restored, the participants may have felt less need to protest.  

So, although expressing gratitude can lead to positive effects in situations where people have more-or-less equal power, our research suggests that expressing thanks can lead to harmful effects when people are not socially equal. The positive, other-oriented, and reciprocal nature of gratitude expressions can encourage disadvantaged group members to censor their objection or criticism of the injustice they experience.

How can this problem be avoided? One possible way for disadvantaged groups to avoid this pacifying effect may be to refrain from expressing gratitude in certain situations. Of course, this does not mean that disadvantaged group members should stop thanking people, because then they would be denied the benefits of expressing gratitude. However, our research suggests that, if you are a member of a socially disadvantaged group, you might want to be selective about who and when you thank.

In addition, by learning that it might sometimes be protective for disadvantaged group members to not express gratitude, advantaged group members could lower their expectations that they will be thanked (for example, when doing volunteer work). In that way, they can avoid frustration if they feel like they don’t receive as much gratitude as they think they deserve.

This research is only a first step in studying gratitude in situations that involve social inequality. The social norms that encourage members of disadvantaged groups to express gratitude in unfair situations certainly deserve more critical reflection, both by researchers and in our everyday lives as well.

  - By Inna Ksenofontov

Inna Ksenofontov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Osnabrueck and the University of Hagen in Germany. She studies how seemingly prosocial relations between social groups can solidify social hierarchies and how disadvantaged group members’ attitudes and behaviors might be involved in the maintenance of social inequality.

This post is previously published on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; Character and Context Blog

For Further Reading
Ksenofontov, I., & Becker, J. C. (2019). The Harmful Side of Thanks: Thankful Responses to High-Power Group Help Undermine Low-Power Groups’ Protest. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219879125

The Amazon is the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world, home to roughly 10% of the world species. It’s also the world’s largest terrestrial carbon dioxide sink and plays a significant role in mitigating global warming. While forest fires in this region are frequent occurrences, and typically happen in dry seasons due to illegal slash-and-burn methods that are used to clear forest for agriculture, livestock, logging and mining, the 2019 wildfires season was particularly devastating.  In 2019 alone, estimates suggest over 10 000 km2 of forest within the Amazon biome was lost to the fires with August fires reaching record levels.  Destruction of the Amazon doesn’t just threaten increasingly endangered species and the local indigenous populations. As the amount of carbon stored in the Amazon is 70 times greater than the annual US output of greenhouse gases, releasing that amount of extra carbon into the atmosphere would undo everything society has been doing to reduce emissions.

Deforestation of the Amazon fluctuates alongside the political landscape of Brazil.  Between 1970 and 2005, almost one-fifth of the Brazilian Amazon was deforested.  In the 2000s, President Lula da Silva implemented programs to control deforestation, which reduced deforestation by 80% by 2012.  Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, scaling back the Amazon protections and regulations in hope of stimulating economic growth, which led to a 30% increase in deforestation over the previous year.  The international community was understandably displeased; verbal condemnations were made and aid payments to Brazil were cut. However, for the poor populations living in and around the Amazon, it’s about survival.  Clearing land gives an immediate economic benefit in the form of cattle ranching, even if it’s an inefficient place to farm cattle due to its distance from potential markets and poor soil quality.

If money is the driver of deforestation, perhaps money will offer the solution. The landholders in Brazil could be compensated to forego the profits from converting forests to cattle. There are precedents for such environmental programs, a notable example was China’s Grain for Green program in 1999 – the world’s biggest reforestation program – in which120 million households were paid what amounted to about $150 billion over a decade to protect existing forest or restore forest.  In 1996, the Costa Rica government introduced the Payments for Environmental Service (PES) to pay landowners to protect or restore rainforest on their property.  With a payment of $50 per hectare, it was enough to slow and reverse deforestation rates. By 2005, Costa Rica’s forest cover has increased by 42% from when the program began.

Brazil is also warming up to this idea. One such initiative is the “Adopt a Park” program, announced last month in Brazil, which will allow national and international funds, banks and companies to pay to preserve areas equivalent to 15% of Brazil’s portion of the Amazon – an area larger than Chile.  However, for such programs to succeed and attract international support, the Brazilian government would need to demonstrate their ability to stop illegal loggers and wildcat miners from decimating the landscape.

There already exists an appetite for these conservation schemes among world leaders.  Norway was willing to provide roughly $100 million per year over a decade to support a non-profit dedicated to reducing Amazon deforestation.  In a debate with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president expressed similar sentiment:
I would be right now organizing the hemisphere and the world to provide $20 billion for the Amazon, for Brazil no longer to burn the Amazon.

These cash-for-conservation schemes might seem like handouts, but it is high time the world’s biggest polluters pay their dues.  The Western bloc is responsible for around half of the global historical emissions (the US – 25%, the EU – 22%).  Those who will suffer the most acutely from the consequences of climate change are also the least responsible – the poorest of the poor and those living in island states: around 1 billion people in 100 countries. There is a significant ecological debt owed to low-income nations from industrialized first-world nations for the disproportionate emissions of greenhouse gases. Now that the impacts of climate change are unavoidable and worsening, investment in adaptation to rising temperatures and extreme weather is more important than ever. In the drive to better humankind and amass wealth for a few, we’ve wreaked havoc on the world’s environment and put the lives and livelihoods of many in jeopardy. Now it is time for those of us in the West to use our plenitude of wealth, knowledge and technology to help those in need, and to mitigate and prepare for the consequences of our actions.

  - By Hannibal Thai

Most of us eat junk foods such as donuts, french fries, and soda. Consuming these types of food is associated with adverse health problems such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. So, what motivates us to eat junk food?

The answer, of course, is that our reasons for eating any food vary. For example, we might sometimes eat a chocolate cake for pure pleasure. Yet, at other times we might eat it just to please our friend who is celebrating their birthday.

The many types of motivations for unhealthy eating
According to self-determination theory, our reasons or motivations for engaging in any behavior differ along a continuum. At one end of the continuum, we find the self-determined motivations, which refer to behaviors motivated by inherent pleasure (e.g., enjoying the taste), important values and lifestyle (e.g., a lifestyle of low physical activity) as well as personal goals (e.g., eating to help social connection). At the other end, we have the non-self-determined motivations indicating behaviors pursued because of an internal sense of pressure (e.g., eating comfort food to reduce stress), external pressures (e.g., pressure to eat birthday cake) or unclear and ambiguous reasons (e.g., no clear reason).

Our reasons for eating junk food change during the holidays
In our study, we examined these types of motivations in relation to eating unhealthy and junk food. Understanding these motivations for unhealthy eating is important, because when individuals feel self-determined to engage in a behavior, they are more likely to persist in it.  
Since eating junk food is common and normalized during the Christmas holiday period, this time of the year was chosen for the study. Participants from the United States were followed across time and filled out our questionnaires one month before, during, and one month after the Christmas holidays.

Interestingly, we found that some types of motivations for unhealthy eating fluctuated over time, while others stayed stable. During the holiday period, individuals ate unhealthy food because they thought it was important, they wanted to avoid feeling guilty, and they felt pressured by other eating partners. They were also less confused about what motivates them to eat unhealthy food compared to before and after Christmas. So it seems like unhealthy eating was highly salient during the holiday season, and external pressures were playing a strong role. These results show that the social context in which we eat has a strong impact on our reasons for eating unhealthy food.

Unhealthy eating is more persistent when it is part of our habits
We also looked at how each type of motivation predicted the amount of unhealthy food individuals consumed. We found that four types of motivations (i.e., values and lifestyle, internal sense of pressure, external pressures and ambiguous reasons) were linked to higher levels of unhealthy food consumption. However, only important values and lifestyle consistent with junk food consumption predicted more unhealthy eating at all times (i.e., before, during and after the holiday period). So, although both self-determined and non-self-determined motivations are associated with eating more junk food, it is when unhealthy eating is part of a person’s important values and lifestyle, that junk food consumption is consistently higher.

How do we feel about our motivations for unhealthy eating?
These motivations refer to internal thoughts and feelings. So what’s their relationship with psychological well-being?

We found that when individuals ate unhealthy food because they found it personally relevant and necessary in a given context, they felt good psychologically. However, if they ate junk food for an unpleasant reason such as a pressure they put on themselves, or if they really couldn’t find a good reason for doing so, they experienced lower psychological well-being. That is consistent with the self-determination approach.  But intriguingly, even when feeling that unhealthy eating was part of one’s habits and values increased junk food consumption, eating junk food for this reason was associated with lower well-being.

• In sum, this study challenges the narratives of individual blame for unhealthy eating.  It shows that the social context in which we eat influences our reasons for unhealthy eating. In turn, our motivations for unhealthy eating are differently associated with how much junk food we consume and how we feel psychologically. The diversity of motives associated with healthy eating, and seasonal changes in those motives, invite people and practitioners who are interested in promoting healthy eating to explore the self-determined or non-self-determined motives for the actions at the time.

   -  By Nada Kadhim

Full reference: Kadhim, N., Amiot, C. E., & Louis, W. R. (2020). Applying the self‐determination theory continuum to unhealthy eating: Consequences on well‐being and behavioral frequency. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 50, 381-393. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12667

Words always matter—so much so that they sometimes represent a battleground for competing interests and ideologies. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has become something of a cultural dividing line, like wearing a face mask or a MAGA hat.  But why? 

After all, it  is difficult to argue with the proposition that “Black Lives Matter,” just as it is difficult to argue with the common rejoinder to it,  “All Lives Matter.”  The interpretations of these phrases become problematic, however, when they are taken out of context. We cannot determine what a speaker intends to convey with an utterance without considering the context in which the statement occurs.

This is something of a truism in the field of pragmatics—the branch of linguistics that deals with how people use language—and is a foundational principle in many pragmatic theories of meaning:  The meaning a speaker intends to convey is often not clear-cut but must be inferred by the listener.  Experts disagree regarding how we infer what other people mean from what they say, but almost no one questions that we regularly use contextual information to figure out what other people’s utterances mean.   
The importance of context is particularly clear for understanding  words such as “him” or “here” in which listeners must draw inferences about what the speaker means.  To whom does ”him” refer?  Where is “here?” More relevant, though, is how the meaning of an utterance can be entirely context dependent. Compare, for example, the likely meaning intended by a speaker who says “It’s hard to give a good presentation” in response to the question “What did you think of my presentation?” compared  to the same utterance in response to the question “Don’t you think it’s hard to give a good presentation?”  In the former context the utterance, “It’s hard to give a good presentation,” is a criticism; in the latter, it’s a confirmation.

So, what is the context for “Black Lives Matter” and the various rejoinders to it?  The phrase seems to have originated in 2013 as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trayvon Martin a year earlier.  The phrase was first used by a loosely organized, decentralized movement focused on protesting police violence against African Americans.  The context of the phrase, and the intention behind its use, was to call attention to the police killing of African Americans, in effect, a reminder that black lives matter too.

Of course, “too” was not and is not part of the phrase.  But it was clearly implied in the context in which the phrase initially occurred.  In other words, in an alternative universe in which police killings of African Americans did not occur, uttering the phrase, “Blacks Lives Matter,”  would be somewhat nonsensical, in effect, a non sequitur. But that’s not the universe we live in. And so in the context of our current world, the intended meaning of the phrase is something along the lines of “the lives of black people matter too, just as much as the lives of other people.” 

Shortly after the phrase became popular, the rebuttals “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” began to circulate on social media.  So how should “All Lives Matter” be interpreted?  What is the intended meaning of this phrase?  In isolation, “All Lives Matter” is a truism.  Of course, all lives matter.  But this phrase did not arise in isolation and was instead a direct response to the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  As a response to “Black Lives Matter,” the phrase functions as a corrective statement meaning something like “No, all lives matter.” But, the intention behind “Black Lives Matter” was not to say that only black lives matter, and so “All Lives Matter” is a response to an unintended meaning of that assertion. It is in this way that “All Lives Matter” is often an attempt to undermine or refute the intended meaning of “Black Lives Matter.”

The field of pragmatics teaches us that context is critical for understanding the meaning of an utterance, whether that utterance occurs in a face-to-face conversation or as a hashtag on social media. The battle of the “Black Lives Matter” phrase continues and can be seen in Vice-President Pence’s recent refusal to even say the words Black Lives Matter. Pragmatics provides us with a deeper understanding of what people are intending to communicate with their words and helps us to understand situations in which people argue about the meaning of what they say. 

 - By Thomas Holtgraves

Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University where he conducts research on various aspects of language use.

This post is previously published on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; Character and Context Blog

For Further Reading
Holtgraves, Thomas. (2001) Language as social action: Social psychology and language use. Erlbaum
Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature . New York, NY: Viking

In today’s digital era, it can be difficult sometimes to think of the internet as anything but a source of polarization and conflict. Social scientists have highlighted extensive issues with how online spaces enclose individuals in echo chambers and filter bubbles, distorting our perceptions of reality to fit our worldviews and those of our ingroups. Meanwhile, when encounters with those different from ourselves do take place, such interactions often end in heated incivility, belying the vision of greater interconnection social media had promised in its early days.
 
But findings in peace psychology and allied fields have suggested the importance of intergroup contact to bring about peaceful outcomes. In postconflict societies, past studies showed that dialogue between formerly opposed groups can help bring about reconciliation and reduced prejudice. Would it be possible, then, to utilize online spaces—with their vast, unprecedented capacity to bring people together unhindered by geographical boundaries—to facilitate the same positive impacts?
 
This Spring, the Peace Psychologist had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Hema Preya Selvanathan, a recent PhD graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland. In her recently published work in Peace and Conflict, she tackles precisely such questions of how online spaces, instead of exacerbating societal tensions, might promote discourses of justice or harmony in former Yugoslavia. Past studies had shown that the two discourses do not necessarily co-occur; that is, justice does not always follow discourses of harmony in postconflict contexts.

Drawing on a 4-week field test on a website called Wedialog.net, Dr. Selvanathan and colleagues found that sustained contact between Bosniaks and Serbs resulted greater group identification and demands for justice, suggesting that hostility over past atrocities may have reduced as a result of the intervention. Exploratory analyses on the content of dialogue showed that over the 4-week period, participants expressed lower levels of anger and anxiety, as well as increased focus on the present over time.
 
Interdisciplinary in analysis and international in scope, this research was conducted with Dr. Bernhard Leidner also of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, software developer Ivan Ivanek of Wedialog.net based in California, and an international team of colleagues including Dr. Nebojša Petrovic and Dr. Jovana Bjekic of the University of Belgrade in Serbia, Nedim Prelic of the University of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and computer scientist Dr. Johannes Krugel of the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
 
In the interview that follows, we discuss with Dr. Selvanathan some of the motivations and challenges she encountered for this project. Questions and responses have been slightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

 

 
PP: In the introduction to your paper, you note that "there are numerous calls for dialogue on contentious issues" of our time. While extensive research appears to concentrate on how digital spaces fuel polarization among groups, your work examines how an online platform can facilitate discourses of justice and harmony. What would you say led you to pursue this line of inquiry?
 
HS: I think a lot of research has shown both sides of the coin. On the one hand, online platforms can help promote solidarity and a sense of togetherness in confronting injustice and inequality (e.g., the role of social media in mobilising protests). On the other hand, it can also be echo chambers where we seek to engage with others who share our views, which can lead to radicalisation (e.g., how white nationalist extremism gain adherents online). So it was sort of an open question of whether an online platform that brought together two groups with a history of conflict, would promote positive intergroup outcomes or lead to negative ones.
 
 
 
PP: Unlike much of traditional psychological research which involves laboratory control or strict survey procedures, you and your colleagues conduct a field test in this paper. What novel challenges—and conversely, what benefits—do you think this approach conferred on your work?
 
HS: We faced several challenges. It was difficult to recruit participants for a project like this, since we were asking for quite a bit of time commitment on their end. Participants had to create and log in using an account on Wedialog.net (like you would do on a social media site) and we had no control over whether participants actually engaged in the dialogue during their free time. We also faced technical glitches and complications in terms of linking up participants online posts with their survey responses. To resolve this, we worked closely with our collaborator Ivan Ivanek, a software developer who created the Wedialog.net platform, and also worked with a computer scientist, Johannes Krugel, who helped us extract the data from the platform and convert it to a format that we could then analyse.
 
In terms of benefits, I believe that by conducting an intervention study, participants were very engaged in the study. They got a chance to voice how they feel about the conflict, the relations between groups, and their hopes for the future. We saw that the dialogue was quite personally meaningful to them and many provided rich content. This richness does not really come through with the traditional survey measures in the pre and post surveys. This is why we ended up doing exploratory analyses on the content of the dialogue using LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) because we were hoping to capture that richness in some way.
 
 
 
PP: Another way this work valuably departs from the mainstream is by working with non-Western samples. In recent scholarship, psychologists have discussed the problem of how so much of psychology is based on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, whereas your work explicitly engages the contexts of postconflict societies in Bosnia and Serbia. How do you see this dynamic informing or complicating your research, and do you have thoughts on the WEIRD-ness of psychology more broadly?
 
HS: I think a lot of social psychological research is American-centric and this has limited the kind of research questions we ask, and the applications of our work more broadly. Since we focused on the post-conflict context of former Yugoslavia, it drove us to develop specific dialogue topics that tapped into the experiences of Bosniak and Serb communities. These topics and intervention itself may not be directly transferable or applicable to other post-conflict contexts, but we should always be aware of the constraints of our work. It appears as though when the samples are from the US, people rarely talk about or consider the constraints of their research. I think working with non-WEIRD samples makes you really aware how many unanswered questions there are and how inequality can be reproduced in the scientific enterprise (e.g., privileging certain regions/groups over others).
 
 
 
PP: How do you think the findings of your work will "inform future interventions in postconflict societies"? Is translational or action research something you are engaged or interested in?
 
HS: I think one concrete way we inform future interventions in post-conflict societies is by providing a pilot test of an online dialogue platform that others can use and adapt for their purposes. I know that Ivan Ivanek, the creator of Wedialog.net, has intentions of engaging multiple communities on the platform for a wide-scale intervention. Our study was just a first step towards making this a reality. Having Wedialog.net accessible to multiple users would require more collaboration and partnerships with practitioners and community organizations, and this takes a lot of time and leg work before it can take off.
 
I am very much interested in doing more translational and community-oriented research. However, getting direct access to communities is difficult, especially if you are not a member of the group. This project for example was only possible because of our collaborators in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
 
 
 
PP: Where do you see this particular project fitting in with your career as a psychologist? Would you say there are broader themes which animate and shape the way you formulate and engage research questions? Any dream projects you'd like to someday pursue?
 
HS: This project has helped me become a more internationally-engaged scholar. We got to work together as a team even though I have not met many of my collaborators in person. From this I learned so much about doing culturally sensitive research. I gravitate towards research questions and topics on justice and inequality, and I hope that my research will be able to contribute to social change. I think it would be a dream to be able to collaborate with an organization on the ground to do a larger-scale field intervention in conflict-ridden societies.
 
 - Interview of Dr. Hema Selvanathan by Joshua Uyheng

Dr. Selvanathan and her colleagues’ work may be read online or in print in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Full bibliographic information is provided below.
 
Each issue of the Peace Psychologist presents a spotlight feature on recently published work in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, the flagship journal of APA’s Division 48. This section aims to promote exciting peace psychological scholarship among the Division readership as well as bring to the surface the often lesser-known, human side to academic research in peace psychology. We are especially interested in highlighting the work of early career scholars. If you would like to volunteer your work or any other recently published article for a feature, kindly contact Joshua Uyheng <[email protected]>.

References
 
Selvanathan, H. P., Leidner, B., Petrović, N., Prelić, N., Ivanek, I., Krugel, J., & Bjekić, J. (2019). Wedialog.Net: A quantitative field test of the effects of online intergroup dialogue in promoting justice- versus harmony-oriented outcomes in Bosnia and Serbia. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 25(4), 287–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000395


This article and interview was originally posted in The Peace Psychologist:
Uyheng, J. (2020, Summer). From online to offline peace: Exploring digital interventions in post-conflict societies. The Peace Psychologist. http://peacepsychology.org/the-peace-psychologist