British Journal of Social Psychology

Previous studies on environmental issues in right-wing populism have mostly focused on political actors and their argumentation. In contrast, this study examines environmental populist discourse from the perspective of laypeople in Finland. We used interviews (n = 25) to analyse affective-discursive practices in environmental talk, identifying four partly interrelated practices: belittling the 'annoying liberals', constructing the ordinary rural people as victims, externalizing blame to the 'real' polluters, and glorifying Finnish nature...

Time scarcity has become one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in daily life worldwide. Five studies (total valid N = 1332) examined whether time scarcity elicits people's agentic orientation and dampens their communal orientation, thus increasing the likelihood of objectification towards others. Results suggested that people who perceived time scarcity were more likely to exhibit objectification towards others regardless of whether time scarcity was measured (Studies 1 and 3) or manipulated using either a scenario (Study 2a) or a recall task (Studies 2b and 4)...

Pundits have speculated that the spread of conspiracies and misinformation (termed "misbeliefs") is leading to a resurgence of right-wing, reactionary movements. However, the current empirical picture regarding the relationship between misbeliefs and collective action is mixed. We help clarify these associations by using two waves of data collected during the COVID-19 Pandemic (in Australia, N = 519, and the United States, N = 510) and democratic elections (in New Zealand N = 603, and the United States N = 609) to examine the effects of misbeliefs on support for reactionary movements (e...

In today's fast-paced world, increasing numbers of individuals face time poverty, i.e., having too much to do and not enough time. The current research conducted six studies (total valid N = 1307) examining whether time poverty influences individuals' construal levels and the moderating role of individuals' motivations towards what they do. The results consistently suggest that time poverty leads individuals to adopt more concrete construal regardless of whether time poverty was measured (Study 1) or manipulated either by a scenario (Studies 2a, 3-5) or by a recall task (Study 2b)...

Collective nostalgia is an emotion experienced when one sentimentally recalls events or things related to a particular social identity. We investigated the relationship between collective nostalgia about the United Kingdom (UK) and UK citizens' desire to leave the European Union (EU). We collected data of UK citizens twice prior to the UK's official withdrawal from the European Union (N = 347 and N = 240) and once afterwards (N = 236). Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, utilizing cross-lagged panel models, supported the hypothesis that collective UK nostalgia increased the desire to leave the European Union...

Although there is robust evidence that being more extraverted is related to higher popularity, only few studies have examined which actual behaviours (e.g., verbal content, body language) might explain this association. The current study examined whether observer-rated dominant behaviours (nonverbal, paraverbal, verbal, and general cues) mediate the relationship between self-rated extraversion and its facets (assertiveness, sociability, and activity) and other-rated popularity in zero-acquaintance settings...

Identity fusion - a powerful form of group alignment - is a strong predictor of using violence to defend the ingroup. However, recent theorizing suggests, in the absence of outgroup threat, fusion may instead promote intergroup trust and cooperation. Across five studies we find evidence that fusion to a range of groups (e.g., country, football team) was consistently positively associated with a willingness to trust others generally, trust outgroup members, and social exploration. An internal meta-analysis indicated that fusion was more strongly associated with trust and social exploration, compared to several measures of group identification...

The paper reports the results of registered conceptual replications of the indirect effect of institutional trust in the relationship between precarity and the endorsement of conspiracy beliefs (CB). The original study of Adam-Troian et al. (2023; British Journal of Social Psychology, 62(S1), 136-159) indicated that subjective appraisals of economic hardship are associated with lower trust in governments and institutions, which in turn is associated with stronger endorsement of CB. Our Studies 1 to 3 report a series of replications using Slovak panel data...

Quantification, that is, the shaping of human environments in numerical terms, is so widespread in contemporary societies that it has contaminated almost all spheres of human life. We explore the links between performance quantification and individuals' feelings of being treated in a dehumanized way, that is, metadehumanization. We present an integrative research that assessed the relationships between performance quantification, metadehumanization, and on two of metadehumanization's consequences, that is, stress and disidentification, in three contexts, that is, organizations, sport, and social networks...

Building on the seminal studies of Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif, recent research has advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying social influence by applying a diffusion model analysis. Here, we combined the social identity approach to social influence with a diffusion model analysis to unravel the mechanisms underlying social influence. In particular, we aimed to disentangle whether the difference between in-group and out-group influence on perceptual decision-making is driven by a judgmental bias (i...

This article introduces the Perceived Economic Scarcity Scale (PESS), a novel instrument measuring the subjective evaluation and experience of economic scarcity (the feeling of having insufficient financial resources to meet one's needs). We conducted three high-powered preregistered studies (total N = 1900) to rigorously evaluate the PESS's psychometric properties. In Study 1, we generated a pool of items and used both Principal Component Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis to select the most appropriate items...

With the general aggression model (GAM), Anderson and Bushman (2002) provided an integrative framework to explain the complex nature of aggression. Based on the GAM, we examined whether personological and situational factors (interactively) have an impact on the person's internal state (consisting of aggressive cognition, affect, and physiological arousal), which in turn is assumed to lead to aggressive behaviour. In a large-scale experience sampling study, 403 participants answered 7558 questionnaires over a period of 2 weeks...

Throughout the course of scholarly history, some concepts have been notoriously hard to define. The 'common good' is one such concept. While the common good has a long and contested scholarly history, social psychology research on folk theories - lay beliefs that represent an individual's informal and subjective understanding of the world - may provide a key for unlocking this nebulous concept. In the current paper, we analysed lay definitions of the common good using the linguistic inquiry and word count's meaning extraction method...

Deceiving others is generally viewed as immoral. However, most people lie on a daily basis. This article examines the psychological consequences for the liars themselves, as they are participating in what is generally perceived as immoral behaviour. More specifically, this article focuses on the effects of lying on the liar's self-esteem and affect. We tested if lying, in comparison to telling the truth, lowers people's self-esteem and increases negative experienced affect. In total, three cross sectional and one longitudinal studies were conducted (N = 783)...

According to the subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH), racism is based on an ethnicity-by-gender interaction, with a stronger link between experiencing racist discrimination and subordinate or dominant ethnic group status for men compared to women. This study reevaluates the SMTH, originally focused on objective discrimination, by applying it to self-reported active harm as a theoretically derived measure of racist discrimination and by exploring interindividual differences in female ethnic minority members' discriminatory experiences...

The notion of tolerance is widely embraced in plural contexts, but little is known about how majority members interpret the toleration of minorities. With four studies, we investigated majority group members' interpretations of a minority toleration situation (compared to full acceptance and discrimination situations) as a function of outgroup threat. Study 1 (N = 214) showed that higher perception of threat from Syrian refugees was associated with Turkish natives' stronger likelihood of interpreting a refugee toleration situation as 'acceptance'...

Previous research into the gendered social identity work involved in conspiracy theories (CTs) has largely focused on expressions of masculinity. The present study investigates the employment and mobilization of feminine identities in online Covid-19 conspiracy theory seminars through a critical discursive psychological perspective. The analysis finds three interpretative repertoires for representing the pandemic: the totalitarianism repertoire, the corrupt medical profession repertoire and the awakening repertoire...

We examined the dynamics of minority-directed police violence by considering how our White participants' empathy for Black victims may be influenced by critical intragroup differences related to racial stereotyping. Although the role of stereotyping in reactions to Black Americans accused of crime is well-established, we explore the influence of pejorative Black stereotypes on reactions to Black victims of police violence. Specifically, we investigated the roles of individual differences in the endorsement of the Black criminal stereotype among White observers and manipulated the crime-unrelated stereotypicality (i...

Previous research has identified the combined effects of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) on individuals' militant attitudes. Much of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States and Europe, where political cleavage is drawn between liberalism and conservatism and where RWA and SDO are aligned with conservatism. In this article, we argue that in a different ideological backdrop where RWA and SDO are not bound by conservative ideology, their influence on war support varies...

Throughout the literature, there are assertions that those endorsing conservative ideologies reject the science and solutions of climate change due to perceived threat. That is, they fear that accepting climate change means accepting problems with a favoured socioeconomic system and supporting action on climate change threatens to disrupt these systems. We draw together lines of research and reasoning on this topic to outline three key predictions this perspective makes about the drivers of conservative denial of climate change and opposition to climate policy...