James Wirth, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, will give a virtual presentation in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar on Thursday 1 December, 17:00-18:00.

Ostracism as a social tool for managing burdensome others

Ostracism as a social tool for managing burdensome others Ostracism (being excluded and ignored) is an unpleasant experience which triggers social pain. Given ostracism’s extensive harm, why would individuals use this social tool? One use of ostracism is to remove burdensome others ? individuals whose costs outweigh their benefits. Ostracizing a burdensome other includes not throwing the ball to a player who holds the ball extensively during a virtual ball toss game, not selected a poor performer to do a group task, and excluding a Facebook friend who makes interactions unpleasant and posts inflammatory content. Across these contexts, an alarm in the form of psychological pain, may alert individuals to a burdensome group member and motivate excluding them. In the most recent research, we are examining if burden and psychological pain also motivate intergroup social exclusion—exclusion of others based on their group membership. This research further tests the burden—ostracism link and is an initial investigation of intergroup social exclusion.

This week’s SED colloquium (17 November, 12:00, in-person) will be given by Emanuele Politi, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, KU Leuven.

Psychological advances in refugee perspectives on migration and integration

Migration trajectories of people asking for international protection (broadly defined here as refugees) are marked by broken relationships, loss of social support, and cumulated social exclusions. Yet, current social psychological theories and empirical investigations lag behind in addressing this urgent societal issue. Starting from the basic tenants of a social ecological model of health, I will present recent empirical evidence on the role of proximal social environments as spaces enabling resilience of refugees. Concurrently, I will introduce social psychological literature on intergroup helping, and take examples from the current Ukrainian crisis to illustrate the importance of community involvement in volunteering and solidarity-based actions. Finally, I will familiarize students with transformative research practices that guarantee high relevance and broad impact of research outputs in terms of policy recommendations.

Don’t miss this week’s in-person presentation by Sebastian Berger, Interim Professor for Sustainable Social Development, University of Bern, in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar series (Thursday, 10 November, 12:00-13:00).

The Environmental versus Social Consequence Task (ESCT): A novel experimental paradigm to study value conflicts in pro-environmental behavior

Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) commonly refers to a broad range of human behaviors that produce environmental benefits or avoid environmental harms relative to alternative behaviors (Lange, 2022). Despite environmental psychology’s stated interest in studying behavior, researchers have noted a strong discrepancy between the research target (i.e., to study behavior) and its operationalization (i.e., self-reports, hypothetical behavior, or intentions; Lange et al. 2018). One viable alternative to study pro-environmental behavior is through validated behavioral paradigms (Lange, 2022). Behavioral paradigms are arranged situations that mimic some of the critical contingencies (e.g., cost or benefits) of the situations they are supposed to model. Research participants are exposed to these situations under strict experimental control, meaning that researchers have control over the modeled parameters that are deemed critical for decision-making. In the present research, we introduce a novel behavioral paradigm which pitches environmental against social consequences – the Environmental versus Social Consequence Task (ESCT). We show that the task provokes behavioral responses as predicted. However, we show that psychological constructs essentially do not predict pro-environmental behavior – unlike in similar tasks that do not involve value-tradeoffs.