This research investigates how political ideology shapes laypeople's evaluation of scientific studies examining cognitive differences between groups. In three experiments in Germany and the United States, participants evaluated identical research reports that varied only in the intergroup context-racial (Blacks/Whites) or ideological (liberals/conservatives)-and in which group appeared cognitively superior. Leftists/Liberals consistently rated studies favouring liberals over conservatives as more methodologically sound, less biased and more worthy of pursuit than parallel studies reporting Whites outperforming Blacks. Only White US conservatives (but not German rightists or Black US conservatives) showed a 'mirror image' pattern. Although both ideological groups' research evaluations aligned with ideological in-group favouritism, only left-leaning participants tuned their evaluations to what they deemed socially acceptable research. These results contribute to debates over ideological (a)symmetry in lay assessments of contentious research, demonstrate its context dependence and expose a left-right asymmetry in the motivational processes underlying judgements of controversial science.

How do internalized cultural values shape responses to discrimination among minoritized groups? This research investigates how honour values, originating from socio-ecological contexts marked by insecurity and weak institutional protection, shape prejudice confrontation among individuals from honour-culture backgrounds living in Western European dignity cultures. Across three studies, we examined South and West Asians in the United Kingdom and Turkish post-migrants in Germany. We tested whether endorsement of collective honour and modern proxies of socio-ecological conditions in which honour cultures emerge (e.g., perceived financial threat, low trust in police effectiveness and procedural unfairness) predict intentions to confront discrimination. Studies 1 and 2 showed that the frequency of discrimination experiences and collective honour predicted aggressive confrontation. Studies 2 and 3 showed the dual role of honour norms: endorsement of honour norms related to family reputation predicted only non-aggressive confrontation, whereas endorsement of retaliation norms predicted only aggressive confrontation. Study 3, a pre-registered experiment, found no causal effect of manipulated contemporary manifestations of long-term socio-ecological conditions on honour endorsement or confrontation. Together, findings suggested that lived experiences of discrimination, alongside honour norms, predict confrontation. Moreover, they highlight the importance of distinguishing between dimensions of honour norms when examining culturally grounded responses to intergroup discrimination.

Public sentiment on collateral civilian killings during wartime may crucially impact critical governmental decisions and the trajectory of the conflict itself. Across six studies in Israel and the United States, we examined (1) left-right ideological differences in acceptance of collateral civilian killings across diverse war scenarios and (2) the role of moral values and ideological ingroup norms in underlying them. Conservatives/rightists consistently showed higher acceptance of collateral civilian killings than liberals/leftists, regardless of whether the civilians killed are members of a current rival group or a strategic partner, whether the war involves real-life or fictitious groups, or whether participants are members of the group conducting the killings or mere observers. These ideological differences were mediated by conservatives'/rightists' lower endorsement of individualizing moral foundations but not by their higher endorsement of binding moral foundations. Finally, results suggest that ideological ingroup norms may play an indirect role in shaping these ideological differences.

Objective: This work examines whether climate change-related threat perceptions foster support for antagonistically orientated collective action: either with the goal to radically protest for climate protection or radically, even violently, confront climate protesters. Depending on levels of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as an ideological boundary condition, individuals may respond to perceived climate change-related threat with either proclimate radicalism (with lower RWA) or antiactivist radicalism (with higher RWA). Method: We conducted a longitudinal survey study across three waves (2023-2024) with a representative sample in Germany (N = 1,003 complete observations). As indicators of climate change-related threat, we measured climate change impairment and perceived lack of climate-protective behavioral control; radical responses were operationalized as support for radical climate protest or radical responses against climate activists. Statistical analyses included latent change score models and moderation analyses using structural equation modeling. Results: Longitudinally, changes in climate change impairment positively predicted changes in support for radical climate protest, particularly with lower RWA. Conversely, changes in perceived lack of climate-protective behavioral control positively predicted changes in support for radical responses against climate activist, particularly with higher RWA. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the antagonistic reactions to climate change-related threats. Support for radical climate protests or opposition depend on the different facets of perceived climate change-related threat in line with one's ideological orientation. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for addressing societal polarization and overcoming psychological barriers to effective climate protection.

Intergroup contact theory and research argue and demonstrate that intergroup relations, even in post-war societies, could be improved by individuals' positive contact experiences with outgroup members. This study extends this argument by investigating whether post-war reconciliation is determined by the amount and quality of individuals' personal contact experiences with members of former adversary groups (individual-level contact) and/or by the amount and quality of contact that occurs within the context in which they live (context-level contact). Using multilevel analyses among large representative youth samples from ethnic majorities (N = 2758) and minorities (N = 1751) nested across 40 administrative regions in five post-war countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina; North Macedonia; Kosova; Montenegro; Serbia), we provide substantive evidence that context-level contact is a stronger determinant of reconciliation, surpassing the influence of individual-level contact. Evidence from this research demonstrates the critical influence of the social context, particularly the amount and quality of intergroup contact that occurs within individuals' immediate surroundings, on post-war reconciliation, and provides important guidelines for policies and interventions fostering positive intergroup relations.

Recent research suggests that citizens’ sense of being socially marginalized, or “left behind” in society, plays an important role in triggering support for right-wing populist attitudes. Although perceived misrecognition by others is thought to be a core aspect of this sense of social marginalization, the effect of (mis)recognition on citizens’ support for the populist-right, and the psychological mechanism underlying this effect, has thus far not been directly examined. Inspired by the social identity tradition, we conceptualize the establishment of subjective superiority over the elites on the one hand, and over national minorities on the other, as an identity management strategy in the face of social identity threat, triggered by perceived misrecognition by the elites. Across three studies conducted in Germany, we provide cross-sectional and experimental support for a causal model in which misrecognition, which is directed at people as “nationals” rather than as individuals, triggers contempt toward the elites and rejection of national minorities, via the perception that one’s belongingness to the nation, as a valued member thereof, is threatened (“social identity threat”). Our findings suggest that support for attitudes associated with the populist right may help citizens re-establish their valued identity as full members of the nation, in the face of those who allegedly deny or disregard it.

In collective punishment, a group as a whole receives negative consequences because of the actions of a few. We argue that collective punishments lead to ingroup cohesiveness and adverse intergroup relations by instigating a punishment-revenge cycle. In four experimental studies conducted in Turkey and Germany (N = 2059), we demonstrated that collective punishment increased ingroup homogeneity, negative outgroup attitudes, and counter-collective action intention, while it decreased perceived outgroup fairness. However, the impact on perceived fairness and negative outgroup attitudes was consistent regardless of whether all group members or only perpetrators were punished. This reveals that punishment itself influences the perception towards the punishing outgroup, regardless of the legitimacy and the target of punishment. Overall, willingness for retaliation was boosted by collective punishment; therefore, collective punishment not only fails to silence conflicts but, on the contrary, exacerbates them by fueling the urge for revenge.

Witnesses of moral violations stand up for their moral principles, despite facing substantial costs for intervening. Notwithstanding its importance, little is known whether responsibility attributions and the relation between the victim and a witness (i.e., kinship) have different effects on the intention to intervene in situations of different severity (e.g., moral courage situations). We predict an interaction between the situation’s severity and the victims’ responsibility for their plight. In less-severe situations, witnesses would be less willing to help when they perceive the victim to be responsible for their plight. However, those who are not seen as responsible would receive more help. For more-severe situations, responsibility is predicted to have no effect. Opposite effects are predicted for the relationship between the helper and the victim. We further predict that perceived costs for helping mediates witnesses’ willingness to intervene. Two studies showed that people are more willing to help individuals who are perceived as being innocent, but only in less-severe situations. In more-severe situations, people’s willingness to intervene increases, regardless of responsibility attributions. We did not observe effects for kinship. Moreover, we provide partial evidence that witnesses of more-severe situations indeed accept higher costs for intervention.

In-between groups encompass individuals who simultaneously belong to social categories that are often seen as mutually exclusive in addition to maintaining their distinct group identity. The current paper sheds light on how members of in-between groups manage their relations within intergroup conflicts. Three studies were conducted among the Druze minority in Israel, a group that is ethnically Arab and shares the Arab identity with the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel and simultaneously identifies as Israeli. In Study 1 (N = 300), we found that identification as Druze was positively associated with the identification as Arab and Israeli. In Study 2, we examined Druze's endorsement of conflict narratives compared to Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian citizens (N = 271). While the latter participants endorsed their ingroup narrative more than the outgroup narrative, Druze participants endorsed both narratives equally. In Study 3, we tested Druze's solidarity with the Palestinian minority against the 2018 Nation-State Law. We found that overall, Druze participants (N = 568) endorsed more inclusive amendments that benefited the Druze and Palestinians than exclusive amendments that benefited the Druze only. In all studies, we tested the role of identification with the rival groups. We discuss these findings and suggest possible underlying mechanisms.

In October 2019, student protests in Chile quickly expanded into a mobilization of more than three million citizens, who protested for nearly a year and successfully brought about sociopolitical change. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the social‐psychological processes behind the Chile despertó, we analyze the protests using the group‐consciousness model. The model assumes that collective action is fuelled by a sense of belonging to a group formed around the unifying idea of sociopolitical change through a new constitution, anger at the current status quo, and a belief that protesters can work together to effect the desired change. Data from over 700 Chileans collected in May 2020 indicate that (1) group consciousness is an important construct related to participation in collection action, (2) the main predictors of the group consciousness of Chile despertó are perceived social inequality and unfairness of authorities, and (3) family support and left‐wing ideology are positively related to participation in collection action, which are partially mediated by group consciousness. Thus, the current study highlights unique factors that contributed to the Chile despertó and highlights the commonalities of key social‐psychological processes in collective action.

Right-wing populism which had been considered fringe just a few years ago became gradually more mainstream. Given the epidemic impact of divisive populist rhetoric on hostile behavior and its strong association with anti-immigration, it is important to ask whether people endorsing populism also justify attacks against asylum seekers. Using the German General Social Survey data ( N = 3,268), we tested a model in which the endorsement of populist beliefs predicted sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers in Germany, through national pride and moral justification of political violence. Results showed that people who evinced higher endorsement of populist beliefs showed also higher sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers. Furthermore, national pride and moral justification of political violence mediated the relationship between populist beliefs and sympathy for attacks against asylum seekers. The role of right-wing populism in the justification of violence toward outgroups is discussed within a contemporary social-psychological framework.

What positive effects do victims gain by punishing their offenders? Previous research suggests that punishment increases victims' justice-related satisfaction only when the offender indicates that they changed their moral attitude and behaviour. However, offender change may increase justice-related satisfaction independently of punishment. So far, it is empirically unclear whether punishment affects satisfaction beyond offender change (e.g. by producing the change), and whether punishment has positive effects on victims that are independent of offender change, specifically how it empowers victims. In two studies, we use a full experimental design to test the unique influence of punishment and offender change on victims' justice-related satisfaction and empowerment. In a third study, we extend the design and additionally test for the effects of assigned versus self-selected punishment. Across three studies (N = 824) with different methodological approaches, we consistently found that offender change alone increased victims' justice-related satisfaction-and this effect was not moderated by punishment. Study 2, but not Study 3, showed that punishment alone empowered victim-and this effect was not moderated by offender change. This indicates that offender change and punishment have independent roles in producing positive effects on victims. Overall, it was offender change and not punishment that made victims feel that justice has been done.

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non-personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both "losers" and "winners" with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real-world, real-time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts-an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.

Vocal emotion recognition (VER) in natural speech, often referred to as speech emotion recognition (SER), remains challenging for both humans and computers. Applied fields including clinical diagnosis and intervention, social interaction research or Human Computer Interaction (HCI) increasingly benefit from efficient VER algorithms. Several feature sets were used with machine-learning (ML) algorithms for discrete emotion classification. However, there is no consensus for which low-level-descriptors and classifiers are optimal. Therefore, we aimed to compare the performance of machine-learning algorithms with several different feature sets. Concretely, seven ML algorithms were compared on the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech: Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP), J48 Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Simple Logistic Regression (LOG) and Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) with 10-fold cross validation using four openSMILE feature sets (i.e., IS-09, emobase, GeMAPS and eGeMAPS). Results indicated that SMO, MLP and LOG show better performance (reaching to 87.85%, 84.00% and 83.74% accuracies, respectively) compared to RF, DT, MLR and KNN (with minimum 73.46%, 53.08%, 70.65% and 58.69% accuracies, respectively). Overall, the emobase feature set performed best. We discuss the implications of these findings for applications in diagnosis, intervention or HCI.

In this 28-country study ( N = 6112), we assessed how subjective perceptions and objective indicators of wealth were associated with majority group members’ perceptions of realistic threat related to immigration. Subjective wealth was assessed by individuals’ perceptions of their personal wealth (current/anticipated) and of their coun-try´s wealth, whereas objective country-level wealth was assessed by GDP and HDI. Multilevel analyses showed that living in a country with a lower objective wealth and perceiving the country’s relative wealth as low were associated with higher levels of perceived realistic threat. We also found that an anticipated decrease in personal wealth in the future was associated with higher threat perceptions only in low HDI countries. Our results suggest that perceived realistic threat is fostered by a perceived decline in the current wealth of the country, and country-level wealth may play a role in calibrating threat responses to anticipated personal wealth.

Abstract. Retributive theories predominantly focus on third party’s motives for punishment, which are rather affected by the offender’s malicious intentions than the actual outcome of the offense. However, victims experience an offense from a different perspective. The value/status approach argues that an offense has two facets that produce different threats: the intentional violation of values and status imbalance between offender and victims. We suggested that third parties and victims punish unfair intentions, whereas victims also punish because of the outcome inequality. In the present study, we orthogonally crossed the factors offender’s intention with the actual outcome and perspective of punisher (third-party versus victim). Results show that victims punish harsher than third parties. However, there are no qualitative differences of third-party punishment and punishment by victims. Rather, both punish malicious intentions and outcome inequality. We discuss how the findings relate to retributivism and other psychological theories of punishment.

Groups in conflict can act against one another in various ways, such as inflicting physical injury upon out-group members, actively expelling them from the social sphere or denying them basic rights. While intergroup conflict literature is mostly dedicated to identifying the psychological determinants of such overt, or active, forms of intergroup harm, less research has been dedicated to the psychological mechanisms that intensify intergroup harm inflicted through inaction, such as ignoring the out-group, withholding assistance, and avoiding mutual cooperation. The goal of the present research is to identify the distinct emotional determinant of "harmful inaction" in intergroup conflict across various socio-political contexts, focusing on the experience of group-based contempt. Across seven studies, using different methods, we find that support for harmful inaction towards the rival in conflict is uniquely associated with group-based contempt, compared to anger (Studies 1a-d, 2–3), hate (Studies 1b-d, 2), disgust (Studies 1b-d, 2, 4), and fear (Studies 1b-d, 2). These findings were consistent across different contexts of intergroup conflict, different specifications of harmful inaction, and different sets of controlled emotions. Taken together, our results suggest that group-based contempt has a unique contribution to fueling and maintaining intergroup conflicts by triggering a unique type of intergroup harm.

In this 28-country study (N = 6112), we assessed how subjective perceptions and objective indicators of wealth were associated with majority group members’ perceptions of realistic threat related to immigration. Subjective wealth was assessed by individuals’ perceptions of their personal wealth (current/anticipated) and of their country´s wealth, whereas objective country-level wealth was assessed by GDP and HDI. Multilevel analyses showed that living in a country with a lower objective wealth and perceiving the country's relative wealth as low were associated with higher levels of perceived realistic threat. We also found that an anticipated decrease in personal wealth in the future was associated with higher threat perceptions only in low HDI countries. Our results suggest that perceived realistic threat is fostered by a perceived decline in the current wealth of the country, and country-level wealth may play a role in calibrating threat responses to anticipated personal wealth.

Conservatives perceive the world as a more dangerous and threatening place than liberals, which explains conservatives’ more cautious social behaviors and their greater support for policies (e.g., anti‐immigration and harsher punitive measures) that aim to manage and reduce perceived threats and uncertainties. However, past research operationalized the “world” as a place replete with social and physical threats (e.g., street crimes and terrorism). Less attention has been given to the economic world, which is equally characterized by threatening events (e.g., corporate crimes, stock market crashes). In four studies, we examined whether differences in appraisal of the economic world explain ideological differences in stock market participation and neoliberal economic policy preferences. The findings reveal that liberals perceive the stock market as a more dangerous and riskier place than conservatives. This asymmetry explains liberals’ cautious investment behaviors, their greater support for regulation of the stock market, and their greater opposition to privatization of Social Security. We argue that liberals’ greater support for these policies serves to protect investors and the general public from the perceived harms of the economic world. Our findings suggest that the psychological processes underlying threat management and uncertainty reduction are similar for conservatives and liberals, but these processes are context dependent.