A test of the maintenance of the effects of imagined contact framed with supportive social norms as a teacher-led field intervention.

As the arrival of refugees and asylum seekers continues to increase, schools continue to become a vital center for children to develop positive intergroup attitudes. Teacher-led activities can become useful tools in sustainable prejudice reduction. A field intervention incorporated normative in-group influence with imagined intergroup contact to reduce children's anti-refugee bias. Ten primary school classes (N = 269, Mage = 10.69 years) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (a) class norm-framed imagined contact (n = 88), (b) family norm-framed imagined contact (n = 49), (c) religious in-group norm-framed imagined contact (n = 51), or (d) standard (n = 80) imagined contact. Teachers facilitated a series of four imagined contact activities over 4 weeks, with anti-refugee bias measured at baseline and 2 weeks after the final activity. Imagined contact framed in the class context was associated with significantly lower post-intervention contact intentions bias as compared to standard imagined contact. There were no significant effects of family or religion norm framed imagined contact conditions. Findings are discussed in relation to the feasibility of teacher-led school-based interventions and the importance of a supportive normative context in the classroom for anti-refugee bias.

Trust predicts COVID-19 prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions in 23 countries.

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals' well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one's own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals' willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals' behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

Anti-roma Bias (Stereotypes, Prejudice, Behavioral Tendencies): A Network Approach Toward Attitude Strength.

The Roma have been and still are a target of prejudice, marginalization, and social exclusion across Europe, especially in East-Central European countries. This paper focuses on a set of stereotypical, emotional, and behavioral evaluative responses toward Roma people selected as representing the underlying components of anti-Roma bias. Employing network analysis, we investigated if attitude strength is associated with stronger connectivity in the networks of its constituent elements. The findings from representative surveys carried out in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, France, and Ireland supported our assumption, as high attitude strength toward the Roma resulted in stronger connectivity in all pairs of high- versus low-attitude-strength networks. Our finding yields a solid theoretical framework for targeting the central variables-those with the strongest associations with other variables-as a potentially effective attitude change intervention strategy. Moreover, perceived threat to national identity, sympathy, and empathy were found to be the most central variables in the networks.

'We fight for a better future for our country': Understanding the Ukrainian Euromaidan movement as the emergence of a social competition strategy.

The current research seeks to develop an analysis of Ukraine's Euromaidan social movement in psychological terms. Building on the classic understanding of social competition strategies, we argue that Euromaidan protests can be conceived as an attempt of pro-European Union (EU) Ukrainians to realign the boundaries of the Ukrainian national identity by defeating the alternative pro-Russia integration project championed by the government. In particular, building on the encapsulated model of social identity in collective action, we suggest that Euromaidan is an emergent opinion-based group identity, formed in response to injustice through two self-categorical processes - group-level self-investment into the shared entity (i.e., Ukrainian national category) and disidentification from the alternative Russia-led Customs Union. Using a sample of 3,096 participants surveyed during the protests, we tested our hypotheses with structural equation modelling, where the model accounting for the direct and indirect paths of the self-categorical processes was expected to explain collective action intentions to a great extent than models applying the social identity and encapsulation models of collective action. We found evidence consistent with the proposal that Euromaidan was a pro-EU opinion-based group, formed in response to the government's decision to suspend the EU-Ukraine agreement and around individuals' general perception of unfair government authorities.

'The More We Stand For - The More We Fight For': Compatibility and Legitimacy in the Effects of Multiple Social Identities.

This paper explores the expression of multiple social identities through coordinated collective action. We propose that perceived compatibility between potentially contrasting identities and perceived legitimacy of protest serve as catalysts for collective action. The present paper maps the context of the "Euromaidan" anti-regime protests in Ukraine and reports data (N = 996) collected through an online survey following legislation to ban protests (March-May, 2014). We measured participants' identification with three different groups (the Ukrainian nation, the online protest community, and the street movement), perception of compatibility between online protest and the street movement, perception of the legitimacy of protest, and intentions to take persuasive and confrontational collective action. We found evidence that the more social groups people "stood for," the more they "fought" for their cause and that identifications predicted both forms of collective action to the degree that people saw the protest and the online movement as compatible with each other and believed protest to be legitimate. Collective action can be interpreted as the congruent expression of multiple identities that are rendered ideologically compatible both in online settings and on the street.