To effectively address current environmental challenges, public policies must provide solutions that are both adapted to and acceptable to the population. It is therefore essential to study the conditions that determine their acceptability. We conducted a quantitative study among Paris residents to explore their perceptions of local and concrete environmental public policies. The aim was to investigate the perceptions of Parisians ( N = 699) regarding four environmental public policies implemented in the city of Paris. Specifically, the study examined the elements that most influence perceptions of fairness and the acceptability of these policies, in relation to their degree of coerciveness. Consistent with our hypotheses, the results show a significant relationship between perceived fairness and the acceptability of the policies. Moreover, participants seemed to place great importance on aspects of procedural justice and distributive justice, as well as the opportunity to improve the current socioeconomic system. This tendency was present regardless of whether the policy was coercive or voluntary. Contrary to our expectations, in our study, perceived limitations on residents' freedoms were not directly linked to the perception of fairness and acceptability for coercive policies. Similarly, perceived effectiveness was not particularly linked to perceptions of fairness and acceptability for less coercive policies. These findings have important implications for the design of local public policies.
Social psychology explains the endorsement of conspiracy theories by drawing both on trait-like concepts such as conspiracy mentality and on structural factors. While each perspective indispensable, an integrative framework that synthesises psychological dynamics and structural predictors and embeds them in the social and political contexts in which such beliefs arise remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose an approach that conceptualizes conspiracy beliefs through its tension between what we coined "everyday conspiracist reasoning" and "vocal conspiracism." Everyday conspiracist reasoning describes interpretive frameworks embedded everyday experiences within society, marked by deep mistrust and suspicion of hidden agendas. These frameworks offer a sense of psychological security in an increasingly unstable environment. However, when individuals face acute personal or societal crises, these everyday orientations may radicalize into vocal conspiracism, which is a more assertive, public, and all-encompassing belief conspiracies. In these cases, conspiracy thinking can expand to shape an individual's entire worldview. Political responses to crises and regressive group dynamics partly determine whether this progression intensifies or recedes, with the latter potentially reinforcing conspiracist interpretations.
Two studies examined how victimhood beliefs and responsibility attributions regarding the Lebanese Civil War vary by group membership (Lebanese Christians vs. Muslims) and by religious and national identification. We predicted ingroup-favoring patterns in victimhood beliefs and responsibility attributions, particularly among individuals high in religious identification and low in national identification. Study 1 ( N = 405) assessed beliefs following exposure to a chronological war narrative, and Study 2 ( N = 338) introduced event type (ingroup harm-doing vs. ingroup victimization). Across studies, religious identification amplified defensive patterns, especially in responsibility attributions, whereas national identification showed limited buffering effects. In Study 2, event type qualified both victimhood beliefs and responsibility attributions: highly religious participants showed ingroup-favoring responses following reminders of ingroup victimization and more symmetrical attributions following harm-doing. National identification played a limited role, mainly among low religious identifiers, and group membership did not significantly moderate outcomes. Despite persistent defensiveness, participants also acknowledged outgroup suffering, suggesting potential for inclusive victimhood in post-conflict Lebanon.
Although collective action is typically led by local actors, remote participation by diaspora members has become common with the rise of social media and digital connectivity. However, differences in modes of participation may lead residents and diaspora activists to represent protests differently or to misperceive each other's experiences. Such gaps may be reflected in how protests feel and how protest actions are interpreted. This study examined these dynamics in the context of Iran's 2009-2012 post-election protests. A sample of N = 1,254 respondents residing inside or outside Iran completed tasks assessing their own protest representations or predicting the other group's experiences. Although the two groups responded similarly from their own perspectives, diaspora members predicted residents' experiences as significantly less positive, while residents underestimated diaspora members' action identification, perceiving them as lower-level actors focused more on the mechanics of protest ("how") than on overarching purposes ("why"). Greater activism was associated with more positive and less negative affect in protest representations. Protest attendance and online information sharing were associated with less biased predictions of affective experiences and action construals. The findings highlight the mutual misperceptions between local and remote participants that can hinder transnational collective action even in the absence of actual differences in protest representations.
This paper presents a critical theoretical intervention addressing epistemic imbalance in mental health research and practice related to Kashmir. It (a) develops conceptual frameworks elucidating indigenous healing rooted in Sufi mysticism, communal networks, and culturally specific coping strategies; (b) identifies and theorizes culturally derived constructs essential for contextually appropriate mental health infrastructures and interventions, emphasizing epistemic justice and locally situated knowledge; and (c) demonstrates culturally grounded interventions that foreground indigenous epistemologies on their own terms, addressing the limitations and potential dominance of Western clinical models. By centering Kashmiriyat , the Valley’s indigenous cultural ethos that encompasses communal solidarity, shrine-centered spiritual practices, and historically rooted coping strategies guiding everyday communal and spiritual life, this work reconceptualizes resilience as collective and historically situated. The proposed framework enriches global psychological theory and offers innovative models of culturally congruent and socially transformative interventions for conflict-affected societies.
Structured intergroup programs provide a unique opportunity for youth in divided societies to come together and engage in shared activities. This research examines what makes such programs effective, drawing on cross-sectional survey findings from youth participants (N = 431) in an initiative that embeds intergroup contact within a sports program facilitated by the same global organization across Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Israel, and South Africa. Our hypotheses focus on the pivotal roles of cross-group friendships and empowerment in shaping intergroup contact intentions, ingroup-oriented reconciliation efforts, and self-efficacy development-outcomes crucial for bridging communities in divided societies. Using structural equation modeling, we find that program duration directly and indirectly predicts self-efficacy, whereas it predicts intergroup contact intentions and reconciliation efforts only indirectly through cross-group friendships and empowerment. Combining survey results with qualitative data, this paper highlights two important mechanisms for the success of structured intergroup contact programs and offers practical strategies for fostering them.
Research on the relationship between attitudes towards politics, student participation, and citizenship competencies remains scarce in Latin America, with most studies focused on primary and secondary education, and even fewer conducted in public or private universities. This study examines that relationship, as well as the mediating role of student participation between attitudes towards politics and citizenship competencies. The sample consisted in undergraduate students (n = 489; mean age = 21.20 years; SD = 3.47) from commercially oriented private universities in Chile, which are characterized by low levels of student participation. Three separate questionnaires were administered to measure each variable. Using descriptive analyses and structural equation modelling (SEM), the associations among the variables were analyzed. Results showed that attitudes towards politics do not directly predict citizenship competencies, but are indirectly associated through student participation, which itself was found to be acceptably related to both constructs in a direct and independent manner. The findings suggest that engagement in academic university activities can function as a formative space that connects student's attitudes towards politics with the emergence of the competencies required for active citizenship. This research highlights the importance of fostering participatory environments within these types of institutions to strengthen democratic capacities, while also suggesting the inclusion of personal variables and diverse university contexts in future studies.
These studies take a dissonance theory perspective to understanding why individuals support Donald Trump as president of the United States despite accusations that he has engaged in sexual misconduct and illegal activity. Participants from the US provided open-ended responses to questions that asked why they support Trump and how they justify their support given the allegations against him. Study 1 was conducted in 2019 two months before Trump was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In this study, 7 categories of reasons for supporting Trump, and 3 categories of justification despite allegations, were identified. Study 2 was conducted in 2019 two days after a vote to impeach Trump. Study 3 was conducted in 2022 two days after Trump was arraigned for his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol Building. Results from Studies 2 and 3 replicated the categories of support and justification. Across studies, the reasons given to justify support of Trump despite allegations of wrongdoing were stating that they disbelieved the allegation, claiming that others do similar misdeeds, and stating that they care about his policies, not his personal life. The current results suggest that individuals in a naturalistic context may choose a number of different strategies in response to information that conflicts with their important beliefs, including denying the veracity of information, increasing the importance of consonant information, directing attention to the immoral acts of others, and making cognitions irrelevant to the dissonant relationship. Study 3 provided evidence that some of these processes may be influenced by dissonance discomfort. These results are unlike those of most laboratory research on dissonance theory, in which participants are given only one dissonance reduction opportunity.
In 1994, the United Nations human security taxonomy signaled a major shift from security as preservation of the nation-state towards a broader and more recent ‘decagonal’ model of human security (entailing everyday needs for personal, health, food, cyber, community, economic, national, environmental, political and, most recently, global security). Building on those foundations, this paper proposes a psychological theory of human security. The latter we propose is a question of ‘systems fit’ between everyday needs and priorities to official responses during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. During COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021, across Australia and New Zealand, we asked N = 2,162 Australasians whether they had each type of security, how important each type was to them, and what each of the 10 sub-types of security meant to them. On face value, a pandemic is a primary threat to national public health. In everyday life, however, all 10 dimensions of human security remained salient and interconnected.
This article proposes a comprehensive taxonomy of the diverse types of “leftism”, grounded in historical and materialist analysis, to inform future comparative research on political systems and ideology. More specifically, it discusses (1) the taxonomic confusion over leftism and liberalism, (2) the plausible overlap between the liberal-conservative and left-right metaphors, (3) leftists as a distinct group versus liberals, (4) leftists as different groups from each other, and (5) the implications of the above for political, psychological research, and activism, in the hope of encouraging debate, advancing our understanding of social reality, and improving cooperation and conflict resolution.
By using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified eight profiles, each representing different combinations or "alloys" of the authoritarian syndrome and associated sociopolitical attitudes. Our findings reveal that authoritarian dispositions do not uniformly correlate with overt prejudice or resentment; instead, they manifest in complex, socially influenced forms. While some profiles exhibit strong authoritarian aggression and conspiracy beliefs tied to manifest right-wing extremism, others demonstrate more contained or even absent devaluation tendencies. The study also uncovers gender-specific variations in authoritarian processing, with certain profiles being predominantly male or female. These insights emphasize the role of societal conditions in shaping authoritarian dynamics and underscore the persistent threat posed by particular authoritarian profiles.
Drawing on goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2002), this preregistered study explored the relationships between political and non-political goals among individuals with varying levels of political engagement. We conducted 40 semi-structured qualitative interviews with activists, non-activists, and former activists from Poland and Norway. We identify three recurrent relationships between political and other life goals, such as work, relationships, health, and basic psychological needs: (1) suppression, where non-political goals eclipse activism or vice-versa; (2) conflict, experienced as chronic trade-offs that often precipitate burnout; and (3) facilitation, whereby non-political goals enable sustained engagement. These relationships manifest as four distinct goal structures. Activists typically displayed either a “juggling” structure that continuously balances multiple commitments, or a “political-dominant” structure in which the cause overrides alternative goals. Non-activists most often subordinated political aims, whereas former activists described a fluctuating “all-or-nothing” structure—initial single-minded commitment followed by strategic withdrawal when costs outweighed perceived impact. Cross-nationally, Polish participants reported more multi-issue activism and acute work–activism conflicts than Norwegians, potentially reflecting longer working hours and political dissatisfaction. Our findings corroborate goal systems theory by showing how dynamic configurations of goal relations underpin trajectories of engagement, disengagement and re-engagement.
The colonial wound signifies the contemporary societal structures which undermine, maim, and destroy the humanity of colonised subjects. In South Africa, the colonial wound manifests in different ways. We see the colonial wound at work in the country’s disproportionately high rates of racialised poverty and State violence, Afrophobia, and ongoing land dispossession. Addressing the colonial wound demands a kind of decolonial healing that transcends bio-psycho-social models. We understand such healing as radical healing. Although several scholarly conceptions of radical healing have been advanced, there have been few attempts to engage with how marginalised communities conceptualise and enact healing in relation to coloniality. As such, relatively few studies have explored the complexities of practicing and conceptualising radical healing within a decolonial framework. The present study aims to speak to this gap. In this study, we engaged with three marginalised South African communities, facilitating six group discussions on radical healing. In bringing the southern African concept of lekgotla (a collective process of deliberation) to bear on critical discourse analysis, we examined the discourses upon which participants drew in the group discussions to construct radical healing. Although several discourses were identified in the data, two were most pertinent to the objectives of this study. The first discourse, Contested Signification , spoke to the inherent variability within radical healing conceptualisations and practices, where the second discourse, Healing Practicalities , evoked the pragmatic struggles inherent to practicing radical healing through a collective and community-led process. In our concluding reflections, we consider what participants’ discursive constructions of radical healing might teach us about the colonial wound and, against this, what it means to take up decolonial radical healing practices in and beyond the discipline of psychology.
In much of social psychology, citizenship has been examined and understood in terms of how it proceeds from nationhood and how various versions of nationhood can be mobilised to exclude others. In this paper, we deviate from this line of scholarship to identify and examine practices by which constructions of citizenship are developed to inform nation-formation. We examine how versions of territory, national belonging, and history are intertwined in the construction of citizenship through a discursive and rhetorical examination of debates on Indian citizenship at two momentous occasions for India: the drafting of India’s constitution (1946-50) and the Citizen Amendment Act 2019. Analysis shows that citizenship policies were evaluated in terms of whether they realised the rights and entitlements of Hindus to the territory of India outside of the Indian nation-state. The findings then show that belonging to a territory is a salient resource in negotiating citizenship, and this can in turn work to support or undermine the idea of a nation-state.
In a large ( N = 1,600) nationally representative and longitudinal survey of the American population, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic we investigated whether dangerous or competitive worldviews shifted. Results show that across the span of one year (i.e., the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic), dangerous but not competitive worldviews, as measured via the dual-process of prejudice framework, significantly increased. This increase was significantly larger for conservatives, whites and older Americans. Further, those who endorsed both worldviews highly at T1 (April 2020) reported significantly smaller increases on average at T2 (August 2021), suggesting that the world was perceived as more dangerous and more competitive one year later particularly for those who saw it as safer and more cooperative at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings highlight that worldviews are malleable, and that specific demographic characteristics and individual differences influence changes in worldviews across time.
Although some scholars have associated cultural threats with radical right support and economic insecurities with radical left support, it has also been highlighted that economic insecurities might drive support for radical right movements. This has created a debate in the literature between cultural threats and economic insecurities as the main drivers of radical right support. To help advance the debate, this study conducts a role-playing experiment in the United States (n = 609), Brazil (n = 594), and Italy (n = 600), testing the effects of cultural threats, economic insecurities, or the combination of both in support for radical left and right discourses. The results suggest that while economic insecurities increase support for the Radical Left (especially in Brazil), cultural threats increase support for the Radical Right. However, the latter effect is mainly driven by the combination of cultural threats with economic insecurities. Comparatively, cultural threats alone increase support for centrist parties instead (especially in the U.S.). The findings challenge anti-immigration as a single explanation for the success of the Radical Right and suggest that radical parties may depend more on their ability to link economic and cultural grievances than on either factor alone.
Lay-theories are sets of interconnected ideas people use to understand and explain their worlds. We used a reflexive thematic analysis to investigate participant-generated lay-beliefs about COVID-19 disparities between White and Black communities (N = 150) and between White and Latinx communities (N = 145) in the United States. We extracted six themes from lay-beliefs about COVID-19 racial health disparities: perceived non-compliance with guidelines, beliefs about biological health, the assumptions about cultural differences, concerns about working conditions, acknowledgement of structural barriers, and naming racism as the problem. Informed by Critical Race Psychology perspectives, we discuss how racism is reflected and reproduced in lay-beliefs about Black and Latinx communities by overlooking evidence-based realities, reproducing negative stereotypes and racist tropes, culturally pathologizing, positioning racial differences as biological, and/or denying the role of racism.
While dementia-related content on Twitter (X) is often stigmatizing, social media also serves as a powerful platform for dementia advocacy. Using thematic analysis, we coded the posts of 23 dementia activists (n = 2,026 tweets). Guided by two social psychological models, we examined four established antecedents of collective action-social identity, perceived efficacy, perceived injustice, and moral obligation-alongside four activists' goals: information dissemination, influence, support provision, and personal experience sharing. We found empathic concern to be a powerful antecedent, manifesting as compassion, humanization of persons with dementia (PwDs), and co-production of knowledge. Social identity and perceived efficacy were more prominent than traditional antecedents like injustice or moral outrage. Activists often framed dementia in ways that fostered identification as a member of the dementia community, empowerment, and belonging. Support giving and experience sharing were the primary goals of dementia activists, indicating a strong focus on sustaining the ingroup rather than addressing injustice or fighting for societal change. These findings underscore the need for expanding existing models of collective action to better account for online identity-affirming and community-support actions in disability communities and emphasize empathic concern as a key mobilizing force in dementia activism. We discuss the implications of a new model of online dementia activism and the role of online dementia communities as effective platforms for activism and support.
Low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals vote for left-wing parties on economic grounds and right-wing parties on cultural grounds, while high SES individuals exhibit the opposite pattern. Various psychological mechanisms may explain this pattern. Using data from 9 European countries (n = 8,750), we quantified the mediating role of economic system justification, economic and symbolic threats, anti-immigrant attitudes, and national identification on the relationship between two indicators of SES (education and income) and right-wing voting intentions. The negative link between education and right-wing voting was predominantly mediated by anti-immigrant attitudes and immigration-specific threat. In contrast, the positive link between subjective income and right-wing voting was predominantly mediated by economic system justification. These findings identify two psychological processes that may underlie the disparity between income-related and education-related effects on political preferences.
Limited research has examined the dynamics of collective action among disadvantaged groups, especially the impact belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups has on intraminority solidarity. While previous research has found that perceived similarity fosters collective action among disadvantaged group members, in this paper we introduce intersectional awareness as a novel mechanism through which intraminority solidarity among multiple disadvantaged groups can be facilitated. Participants were categorized by their number of disadvantaged group memberships: 0, 1, 2, and 3, based on their race, gender, and sexual identities. Across two studies, participants (N = 550) with a greater number of disadvantaged identities were more likely to engage in collective action for two disadvantaged outgroups (i.e., Muslims, people with a disability). Mediation analysis revealed that increased intersectional awareness but not perceived similarity explained this relationship. This research introduces intersectional awareness as a novel mechanism through which intraminority solidarity can be fostered.
