The social change lab: 2020 and beyond!

Members of the University of Queensland Social Change Lab posed for our annual end of year photo. In the COVID era, many lab members were Zooming in…. From left to right in person: Morgana, Zahra, Hema, and Winnifred. From left to right in the Zoom: Top row: Mai, Susilo, and Eunike; middle row Robyn, Kiara, and Ruby; last row: Madeleine, Zoe, and Leila.

 
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