Impact
The Department of Social Psychology consists of a vibrant mix of people interested in Social, Economic and Work & Organizational Psychology.
Understanding how people (such as citizens, consumers, employees, managers, and policy makers) make decisions is the foundation of interventions designed to help them do better. This is of paramount importance to public policy and practice.
Policies, interventions, regulations and the like have a much higher likelihood of being successful when they are evidence-based and take into account the factors and processes that underlie people’s behavior and decision making. Thus, the knowledge generated in our research has a real impact on people’s lives.
Furthermore, a focus on decision making within four relevant themes (diversity and inequality, anti-social behavior, psychology of digitalization, emotions and well-being) allows us to further many of our impact initiatives and to create a community and infrastructure to achieve the aforementioned goals. Specifically, by engaging with policy makers, business professionals, and practitioners, we stimulate the application of knowledge about decision making in order to inform policy and practice.
Examples of Projects and Grants
Below are a few examples of current projects through which the Department of Social Psychology informs policy and practice:
Physiostracism: Using psychology to predict prosocial and antisocial responses to ostracism
Funding body: NWO, Dutch Research Council
Experiencing ostracism, the act of being excluded and ignored, significantly influences individuals' well-being. Responses to ostracism evolve over time, typically following a two-step process. Initially, individuals undergo the experience of social pain. Subsequently, they navigate this distress by engaging in either prosocial or antisocial coping behaviors. However, the factors influencing the choice between these responses remain largely unexplored. This research aims to unravel the mystery of how social pain can lead to such divergent coping responses.
Duration of the project:
2020-2024
Research team:
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Ilja van Beest, Tilburg University
Co-promotor:Dr. Thorsten Erle, Tilburg University
Advisors: Dr. Dongning Ren, Tilburg University; Dr. Rima-Maria Rahal, Tilburg University; Prof. Dr. Kipling Williams, Purdue University, USA; Prof. dr. Arcangelo Merla, Gabriele D’Annunzio University, Chiety-Pescara, Italy
PhD candidate: Anneloes Kip, Tilburg University
Social partner: Critical Mass
The (in)accuracy of first impressions
Funding body: NWO, Dutch Research Council
Facial appearance plays a crucial role in how people and algorithms assess trustworthiness, intelligence, and various other characteristics. The impact of these initial impressions extends significantly to legal, professional, and social spheres. However, the accuracy of inferring different traits from facial features remains a contentious topic, marked by conflicting evidence in the empirical literature.
This inquiry holds substantial implications; inaccurate first impressions may lead to unjust treatment based solely on appearance, affecting contexts such as courtrooms and job interviews. Addressing this issue requires overcoming two key obstacles: the lack of robust stimuli and insufficient collaboration among researchers.
The proposal includes the creation of a large-scale, open-access database focused on the study of first impressions, with the goal of promoting and democratizing research in this area. It also proposes international collaboration among researchers to promote scientific consensus and increase understanding of first impressions.
Duration of the project:
2024-2028
Research team:
Principal Investigator: Dr. Bastian Jaeger, Tilburg University
Empathy and animal welfare
Funding body: TSB starter grant, Tilburg University
This project investigates the intricate role of empathy in human-animal relationships, considering it as a robust and extensively studied predictor of prosocial behavior in psychological research. While we possess substantial knowledge about empathy in interpersonal dynamics, our understanding of its role in human-animal relations remains comparatively limited.
Recent research highlights certain limitations of empathy in inspiring prosocial behavior, particularly in the context of animal welfare. Concepts such as "parochial empathy" (feeling less empathy for individuals outside one's ingroup), "motivated empathy" (avoiding empathy-triggering situations to avoid helping certain individuals), and "scope insensitivity" (more suffering doesn't necessarily evoke a stronger empathic response) present challenges in comprehending empathy's full impact.
The dissimilarity between most animals and humans poses challenges to empathizing with them, especially in terms of imagining an animal's perspective. However, empathy can still play a significant role in valuing the well-being of animals. This project aims to unravel the importance of different facets of empathy in shaping responses to animal suffering. It will analyze the relationships between various empathy dimensions and attitudes towards animals, empirically testing how different empathic processes effectively alter these attitudes.
The ultimate goal is to translate these theoretical insights into practical applications by designing and testing an intervention targeted at reducing meat consumption, thereby contributing to both theoretical knowledge and practical solutions in the realm of human-animal relations.
Duration of the project:
2023-2027
Research team:
Supervisor: Dr. Bastian Jaeger, Tilburg University
Co-supervisor: Dr. Thorsten Erle, Tilburg University; Dr. Seger Breugelmans, Tilburg University
PhD candidate: Anna Pörnbacher, Tilburg University
Video gameplay and mental health
Funding body: UK Research and Innovation, Economic and Social Research Council ESRC
Video games enjoy immense popularity, yet their effects on players remain a scientific puzzle. With health and welfare stakeholders, along with the global games industry, seeking a nuanced understanding of games, there's an urgent need to regulate gameplay, offer guidance to parents and players, and foster responsible game development.
Our team employs diverse strategies to directly capture data from games and platforms, aiming to comprehend both the quantity (time spent playing games) and quality (game selection and in-game activities) of gameplay. One key strategy involves collaboration with major industry players like Nintendo and Microsoft, facilitating the sharing of objective, industry-captured data on player behavior. We integrate this gameplay data with mental health surveys, allowing us to explore players' emotions before, during, and after play over extended periods. Our collective effort aims to enhance the methodologies social scientists use to study the influence of video games on mental health. The primary goals of our work are:
Provide tools and infrastructure for social scientists to access previously inaccessible objective data on the quantity and quality of gameplay.
Apply best practices in transparent and open research to generate robust findings that elucidate the conditions under which games impact well-being.
Create large-scale, freely available datasets on the longitudinal relationship between video game play and mental health, utilizing representative samples of players.
Duration of the project:
2023-2025
Research team:
P.I. : Prof. Andrew Przybylski, University of Oxford
Researcher: Nick Ballou, University of Oxford
Research associate: Dr. Kristoffer Magnusson, Stockholm Centre for Psychiatry Research, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden; Dr. Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University
See the project's website
A change of perspective: Evidence-based perspective integration strategies aimed at making academic institutions more inclusive
Funding body: NWO, Dutch Research Council
An inclusive academic culture is crucial for attracting and retaining diverse talent and for offering all individuals an environment where they can flourish. Attaining an inclusive academic culture requires attending to differences in perspectives and considering these in an effective manner in decision making processes and daily interactions. This research examines the key ingredients of effective perspective integration in order to promote inclusion in academia.
Duration of the project:
2023-2026
P.I.: Dr. S. Gündemir, University of Amsterdam
Co-applicants: Dr. I. Hoever, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Prof. Dr. J.K. Oostrom, Tilburg University
Culture, character and competence - students dealing with different types of adversity in a globalized world
Funding body: German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst)
People deal differently with challenges in their lives, depending on who they are. We propose to investigate how differences in character help to understand how students deal with adversity. Students face different types of adversity, including academic stress (e.g., the pressure to perform, negative feedback) and, in the case of international students, acculturative stress (i.e., the stress associated with staying abroad). International students are increasing in number world-wide, including in the Netherlands, but little is known about how these geographically and culturally mobile populations deal with academic and acculturative stress and adversity.
We use a longitudinal, experience sampling study to investigate how character affects how international and Dutch students deal with different types of adversity. We expect that individuals’ characters are predictive of adjustment and academic success. Understanding, not only differences between groups of students, but also differences between individuals’ characters and their unique ways of dealing with challenges will be instrumental to increase intervention effectiveness (e.g., introduction weeks, counselling practices, activities of student associations).
Duration of the project:
2020-2024
Research team:
P.I.: Dr. Michael Bender, Tilburg University
Co-applicant: Dr. Jia He, Dr. Mark Brandt, Michigan State University
Effect of stereotyping on decision making of professionals working with victims of honor-related violence
Funding body: Herbert Simon Research Institute
Honor-related violence (HRV) encompasses “mental or physical violence committed from a collective mentality in response to a (threatened) violation of the honor of a man, a woman or a child, and with that of his or her family”. Generally, western professionals struggle with the concept of honor and violence over honor-related matters. Due to a lack of basic knowledge, professionals and police officers may end up relying on incorrect, stereotypical ideas about victims, thereby reinforcing stigma around HRV, and increasing attribution of honor to be part of an outgroup with undesirable characteristics, which results in unequal treatment.
Stigma hinders victims to be heard, supported, and be physically and emotionally safe, prompting them to avoid seeking help. Our aims are to: (a) describe prevalent stereotypes about HRV victims, (b) study how stereotypes affect attitudes towards victims and influence professionals’ decisions (as reported by both victims and professionals), and (c) assess how training reduces stereotyping by professionals.
Duration of the project:
2024-2028
Research team:
Dr. Diana Roeg, Dr. Michael Bender, Prof. Dr. Dike van de Mheen, Dr. Hans van Dijk, Dr. Janne van Doorn, Dr. Yvette van Osch.
See the project's website
Armenian collective identity: Meaning and content
Funding body: International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology
Against the historical backdrop of the Armenian Genocide (1915), and more recently, the resurgence of the conflict in Nagorno Karabagh, threat to the continuity of the Armenian collective identity is pronounced. Managing the psychological and societal ramifications of such threat is important, but it is worth first examining how groups that are under continuity threat conceptualize their collective identity and integrate collective historical traumas into their narrative.
In their intergenerational transmission, collective traumatic events take center stage in a group’s collective identity, making them central to what it means to be part of a group. Such collective traumas have been described as “chosen traumas” and are central to maintaining and strengthening group identity, as well as serving as a lens through which other group-related historical events are evaluated. In the context of our project, we conceptualize the 1915 Armenian Genocide as a chosen trauma and define collective identity as a subjectively claimed identity that is shared with a group of others.
We aim to understand the narrative content and derived meaning of the Armenian collective identity vis a vis the historical trauma of the Armenian Genocide.
The current proposal will bring together researchers from different disciplines and countries to share their perspectives, not only in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of research methods in a workshop titled “Armenian collective identity: Meaning and content”. This project is a pre-study to a subsequent larger cross cultural, mixed methods study.
Duration of the project:
2023-2024
Research team:
P.I.: Dr. Lucy Tavitian – Elmadjian, Tilburg University
Co-applicant: Dr. Thia Sagherian – Dickey, Durham University
Dr. Michael Bender, Tilburg University