Social Psychology Special Issue

Psychology people in profile
huge difference to an organisation’s competitiveness
and viability. Our developmental
experiments give us insight into the different
ages at which children figure out how other
members of their groups will respond to
conformity and non-conformity (deviance).
These sorts of studies tell us a lot about when
and why children may include or exclude
one another from social relationships at
school, which in turn has implications for
their psychological health and wellbeing. We
also do archival research, such as our analysis
of the composition of lynch mobs which
showed that the severity and barbarity of
lynchings increased as the proportion of the
number of crowd members increased relative
to the number of victims.
Could some of your research/knoweledge also be
applied in the general public rather than specific
crowds?
Some early research examined the rise of Scottish
nationlism amongst 16- to 18-year-olds
during the 1980s. We were recently able to
conduct a survey of a similarly aged group of
young people in Scotland and to test whether
our theory of political change accurately
predicted their choices to vote ‘Yes’ in the
referendum on Scottish independence. This
work has been very exciting because it offers a
really tough test of a psychological theory and
at the same time reveals how that theory can
really help to make sense of social change.
A different type of research has been our
work on ageism and age-related attitudes.
We’ve worked with major charities such as
Age UK as well as the Government Department
for Welfare and Pensions over a
number of years. Here we led an international
team to design part of the European
Social Survey. Using evidence from over
50,000 participants from 27 countries we
have been able to show how age discrimination
is linked to people’s wellbeing, how
psychological definitions of age are culturally
framed, how serious a problem age
discrimination is, and on international
differences in age stereotyping. A third core
of our work is to understand how prejudice
and discrimination work across society.
We’ve done extensive work with the Equalities
and Human Rights Commission (and
are just about to commence a new project)
which addresses the question of how
different types of prejudice are connected
and how they occur. For example a recent
paper based on this work revealed a
phenomenon we called ‘equality hypocrisy’ –
people’s willingness to advocate greater
equality for some groups but not others.
Collaborations and work outside the lab…
‘The School of Psychology started as the Social Psychology Research Unit, and later
became the Institute of Social and Applied Psychology. The commitment to application of
research has been there from the outset and we have conducted a great many field studies
and projects working with external organisations. Examples include Race Equality
Sandwell, the Department for Communities and Local Government, as well as other
organisations such as the Anne Frank Trust and People United. These organisations tend
to have fantastic networks and connections into local communities and we have often
tried to help them evaluate or develop their strategies. For example, with People United
and the Anne Frank Trust we have jointly funded PhD studentships that have combined
academic research on topics such as prosociality and kindness or prejudice reduction with
testing the sort of direct interventions that these organisations use. This means we are able
to make use of the creativity and amazing scope and ambition that goes into their work to
really discover how well our theories work. And we complement that by providing our
research skills and insights to test out the potential benefits of their work. It is a win-win
relationship and always generates fascinating questions, problems and opportunities.’
Issue 97 December 2015 5