Alain Van Hiel

• Ghent University

For a long time, research on democratic governance has primarily focused on preferences for singular decision-makers: elected politicians, citizens, or experts. Recently, however, there has been a shift toward considering preferences for multiple decision-makers, but the specifics of these “multi-actor” models remain unclear. This study addresses t...

Research indicates a significant gap between the individual’s pro-environmental attitudes and actual behavior. To explain this gap, the present paper integrates prominent models of ecological behavior with theories of cognitive dissonance and moral disengagement into the new Behavior Attitude Alignment Model (BAAM). This model suggests that behavio...

Objectives: One pressing social issue involves how the ethnicity of a citizen group that commits violence influences societal reactions to these illegal acts. In an incident involving violence committed by Black or White American militia members, we examined the interactive effects between the severity of violence and participants’ ideological atti...

Considering the rise of far-right groups in Western countries, we examined whether exposure to media coverage on the far-right is associated with attitudes toward it, using surveys in 15 Western democratic countries (total N = 2,576). We hypothesized that greater media exposure to the far-right will be associated with greater perceived prevalence a...

The present study explored the multidimensionality of moral identity. In four studies (N = 1,159), we compiled a comprehensive list of moral traits, analyzed their factorial structure, and established relationships between the factorial dimensions and outcome variables. The resulting dimensions are Connectedness, Truthfulness, Care, and Righteousne...

Objective A large number of studies—usually based on samples of adults—have revealed a negative relationship between cognitive abilities and right‐wing ideological attitudes. Recently, this relationship has been claimed to be weaker among adolescents. Method We administered data in a sample of adolescents ( N = 531) who completed a full cognitive...

Objective Recent research shows that for clients who identify as ethnic minority group members, therapists' effort to include ethnic‐cultural topics in therapy conversations—that is, broaching —is important for clients' evaluations of therapy and symptom improvement. However, little is known about how this is experienced by clients and how differen...

Ethnic-cultural procedural fairness refers to the perception that societal actors use fair and unbiased procedures to make decisions vis-à-vis one’s ethnic-cultural group. Prior research using ethniccultural minority samples has convincingly shown that such perceptions are associated with a range of desirable outcomes. Yet, this body of evidence ha...

Technology plays an important role in business and society. This has resulted in the belief that technology is in a unique position to solve organizational and societal problems. However, technology is not regarded as equally impactful by all. To explore these differences, we designed a technosolutionism scale to measure the extent to which individ...

Objective: Outgroup empathy deficit research suggests that White U.S. citizens—especially those most prone to prejudice—should report minimal empathy for Black victims of police violence. We propose that this oft-cited phenomena is not inevitable, and the police-related experiences of those White individuals must be considered. To address this issu...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277077.].

Objective: Addressing ethnic-cultural topics during the process of psychotherapy, i.e. broaching, is considered highly important for ethnic minority clients who consult mental health care services. Surprisingly little is known, however, about clients’ perception of a therapist’s broaching qualities, and how clients’ mental construction of broaching...

Prior studies have linked societal threats to a surge in conservative attitudes. We conducted three studies (N = 1,021) to investigate whether hypothetical threat situations impact peoples’ attitudes toward democracy or alternative systems. Study 1 shows that individuals under threat devaluate representative and participatory government types and s...

The use of chatbots is becoming widespread as they offer significant economic opportunities. At the same time, however, customers seem to prefer interacting with human operators when making inquiries and as a result are not as cooperative with chatbots when their use is known. This specific situation creates an incentive for organizations to use ch...

Recent research describes how procedural fairness can be used to resolve issues related to ethnic-cultural matters. The central finding in this strand of literature is that when minority members experience procedurally fair treatment by societal actors regarding ethnic-cultural issues, this will lead to a range of outcomes that are beneficial for s...

The current research investigated an “ironic” consequence of a perceived procedural fairness climate vis-à-vis disadvantaged groups. Specifically, we examined whether the perception that societal institutions treat one’s underprivileged group in a procedurally fair way negatively impacts upon minority group members’ support for social change. Six s...

Participation in sports and other leisure activities can be an effective tool to enhance feelings of societal belongingness and inclusion among minority group members. Through a survey administered to 8,444 pupils, the present study compared minority pupils’ (Middle Eastern and Eastern European youth) and majority pupils’ involvement in a broad arr...

A more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between ethnic diversity and social cohesion is needed. Ever since Robert Putnam (2007) has put forward the highly contested constrict claim holding that diversity is related to less trust and more social withdrawing, hundreds of follow-up studies across the globe have been conducted. In the...

Do people think that there is such a thing as too much money? The present research investigated this question in the context of hypothetical lottery wins. By employing a mental simulation approach, we were able to examine how people respond to increasing envisioned jackpot amounts, and whether there are individual differences in people’s reactions....

Objective: : Broaching-i.e., a counsellor's effort to install meaningful conversations in psychotherapy concerning one's cultural identity-is a strong predictor of positive treatment outcomes and client satisfaction, especially for minority-identified clients. Despite this understanding, the broaching literature has struggled to translate broachin...

Freedom of speech and political correctness are recurrent and contentious topics in contemporary society. The present study (N = 300 North-American adults) aimed to advance empirical knowledge on these issues by investigating how cognitive ability and trait emotional intelligence predict individuals’ support for freedom of speech and concern for po...

Social support has been shown to be a crucial element in the well-being of children and adolescents. The present research article investigated how various sources of social support (i.e., parental support, teacher support and peer support) are related to school well-being and general well-being,. A survey was administered to N = 12,215 primary scho...

The present study (total N = 901) set out to construct and validate a culturally sensitive instrument to examine anti-White bias among Black UK minority group members. Our novel measure of anti-White bias–which we called the AWB scale–was based upon the Johnson-Lecci scale (JLS; 2003) a questionnaire designed to measure anti-White attitudes among B...

The present study investigated the psychological foundations of the perceived prejudice asymmetry, that is, the observation that members of privileged groups are more likely to consider ‘downward’ bias—advantaged group members displaying ambiguous intolerant behaviour towards disadvantaged groups—as instances of prejudice than ‘upward’ bias—disadva...

We examined whether prejudice-related personality characteristics (i.e., right wing authoritarianism [RWA]) and COVID-19–driven psychological resource loss might predict perpetrator-directed punitive responding (i.e., support for criminal charges) to a COVID-19–related attack on a Chinese victim by a White male. Across two studies, participants com...

Police sexual violence has been ranked as the second most common form of misconduct among police officers. Moreover, there is evidence that Black women are at heightened risk of being victims of such police violence. A report titled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women has brought international attention to the minimal empir...

Recently, a growing number of studies has shown the relevance of Moral Identity to explain (im)moral conduct. The present study compared two moral identity measures in two independent samples (N = 282 and 245): i.e., the Moral Identity Scale (Aquino and Reed, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83:1423-1440, 2002) and the Moral Identity Qu...

Trust violations regularly occur under the form of distributive fairness violations. In response to such violations, the transgressor can signal his or her willingness to go the “extra mile” by compensating the victim beyond the inflicted damage, which is generally referred to as overcompensation. We conducted two behavioral studies (Studies 1 and...

Ample evidence has shown a relationship between right-wing attitudes and ideology-based aggression, yet the question remains whether these attitudes are also associated with aggression in contexts lacking any ideological components. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between right-wing attitudes and aggression in non-ideological, frustrati...

Is political radicalization a product of increased issue position polarization, by which left and right‐wing attitudes become ever more extreme? We argue that this is not the best explanation. Indeed, radical left and right supporters are not so much “left” or “right” in terms of their ideological attitudes. Instead, we argue that political cynicis...

Most prior research has examined procrastination as a type of self-defeating behavior. The present research, however, focused on the social consequences of procrastination, by investigating how decisional leader procrastination as a leader trait affects others in the workplace. We specifically developed the argument that the way in which employees...

Prior research has found that people’s choices in economic games are often only modestly related to their prosocial personality traits and to mundane prosocial behaviors. The present article reviews recent literature showing that the strength of these relationships depends on the level of aggregation. Specifically, we demonstrate an increase in beh...

This article presents a short research report on the relationship between perceived antagonism in social relations measured using the Belief in a Zero-Sum Game (BZSG) scale, life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect. Given that individuals who believe that life is like a zero-sum game are likely to perceive their daily interactions with o...

The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) has garnered intense attention over the past 15 years. We examined the structure of these traits’ measure—the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD)—in a sample of 11,488 participants from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., Asia, Midd...

The present study investigated a potential personality determinant of prejudiced attitudes among minority group members, namely, trait emotional intelligence. Two samples of European minorities (Blacks and Muslims, total N = 506) were collected. The results showed that (1) emotional intelligence was indeed negatively related to particular facets of...

The present research investigated the trickle‐down effect of procedural fairness enacted by societal institutions on minority members’ social trust. Building on the racial identity development hypothesis, we argued that procedural fairness represents a racial socialization experience, which influences how minorities perceive discrimination in daily...

The issue of trust has increasingly attracted attention in the business ethics literature. Our aim is to contribute further to this literature by examining how the use of the carbon copy (cc) function in email communication influences felt trust. We develop the argument that the use of cc enhances transparency—representing an important characterist...

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a pervasive organisational phenomenon, it is still unclear if and when people are willing to cooperate with machines. We conducted five empirical studies (total N = 1,025 managers). The results show that human managers do not want to exclude machines entirely from managerial decisions, but instead pr...

Recent werden er een aantal initiatieven aangekondigd om discriminatie in kaart te brengen, de monitoring hiervan verder te zetten en/of aangepaste maatregelen te nemen. De minister van Wonen kondigde aan om opnieuw een Woonsurvey door het steunpunt Wonen te organiseren en neemt beleidsinitiatieven met de immosector. De minister van Werk kondigde a...

A growing body of research has shown that naturalized citizens’ attitudes towards immigration worsen following citizenship acquisition. Accordingly, these socially mobile individuals tend to distance themselves from their former immigrant ingroup. The present contribution explains such self–group distancing coping strategy in terms of an “ironic” p...

In the present studies, we aimed to show that the perceived procedural fairness of societal actors’ multicultural decisions promotes ethnic minority members’ societal identification. These enhanced identification levels, in turn, contribute to better psychological health and well-being. Firstly, a vignette study in a sample of African Americans exp...

Background The use of electronic devices (smartphones, laptops,...) has gradually become a common activity among primary school children. Especially children's excessive use of elec-tronic games has been increasingly considered an important Public Health issue. This study explored the effects of personal and social factors on gaming behaviour in pr...

Partial decision‐making about disciplinary responses to misbehavior is generally considered unfair and undermines the effectiveness of punishment. Nonetheless, organizational actors often struggle to remain impartial in situations that call for punishment. Impartiality appears specifically hard to obtain when some element of the transgression refle...

In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocatio...

Although procedural fairness has been studied frequently during the past decades, little work has focused explicitly on how procedural fairness affects members of ethnic minorities in the context of multicultural decision‐making processes. The aim of the present study was to investigate how perceptions of procedurally fair treatment of fellow minor...

Researchers have emphasized the value of authenticity, but not much is known about what makes a person authentic in the eyes of others. Our research takes an interpersonal perspective to examine the determinants of followers’ perceptions of leader authenticity. Building on social identity theory, we propose that two fundamental self-identifications...

Many studies have investigated the relationship between ideological attitudes and aggressive tendencies. The present meta-analytic integration of research on this relationship included data of 177 samples (total N = 47,933 participants). The results revealed that this relationship was substantial, r =.31, 95% CI [.27 to.35], p <.001. Such a relatio...

Managerial trickle‐down effects refer to the tendency for supervisors to treat their subordinates in ways analogous to how they have been treated by their own bosses. Whereas trickle‐down effects are widely documented, including in the justice literature, less is known about the conditions under which they are more versus less likely to emerge. Acr...

Abstract Objectives: The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) capture individual differences in aversive personality to complement work on other taxonomies, such as the Big Five traits. However, the literature on the Dark Triad traits relies mostly on samples from English-speaking (i.e., Westernized) countries. We bro...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

Most prior research on the external validity of mixed-motive games has studied only one single game version and/or one specific type of real-life prosocial behavior. The present study employs a different approach. We used multiple game trials-with different payoff structures-to measure participants' behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Commons D...

Freedom of speech for all citizens is often considered as a cornerstone of democratic societies. In three studies, we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech for a variety of social groups across the ideological spectrum ( N 1 varies between 1,373 and 18,719, N 2 = 298, N 3 = 395). Corroborating our the...

Freedom of speech for all citizens is often considered as a cornerstone of democratic societies. In three studies, we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech for a variety of social groups across the ideological spectrum (N1 varies between 1373 and 18719, N2 = 298, N3 = 395). Corroborating our theoretic...

The present study investigated the impact of perceived procedural fairness enacted by societal actors on minority members’ willingness to accept decisions regarding multicultural issues. We particularly focused on ethnic bias suppression, which we expected to be highly salient in this type of conflict and deemed pivotal given its impact on the coll...

jats:title>Abstract The present study conducted in the Netherlands examines citizen's attitudes towards asylum seekers. We collected data in a large (N = 993) heterogeneous adult sample in November 2015, in the midst of the European “refugee crisis”. Our first aim was to map the reactions of citizens towards asylum seekers. Our second aim was to ex...

The Need to Belong concept encompasses the need for inclusion and the discomfort with exclusion. The Need to Belong Scale of Leary, Kelly, Cottrell, and Schreindorfer (2013), however, primarily probes into the discomfort aspect, and it does not distinguish between relational and collective self‐levels. Two studies (total N = 429) provided evidence...

Surprisingly little research has investigated the particular motives that underlie choice behavior in social dilemma situations. The main aim of the present research was to ask whether behavior in take-some games (such as the multiple-person Commons Dilemma Game and the two-person Bandit Game) and give-some games (such as the multiple-person Public...

Issues related to ethnic-cultural diversity often make the news headlines in popular media and have attracted extensive attention in the political arena, as well as in academic research in psychology, political sciences, and sociology. Political scientist Robert Putnam reported that increased diversity is associated with a range of negative outcome...

Recently, scholars have argued that people may sometimes ‘strategically’ endorse ingroup-stereotypes to explain their own underperformance on stereotypic tasks. In the present study (N = 453), after receiving bogus negative feedback on their individual performance on a math/special ability test, women showed higher agreement with statements about m...

Does digital media use support or undermine psychological well-being? This question has not only elicited a lot of attention in the popular media, but it also has been investigated empirically in scientific literature. Much of these studies have been conducted in samples of adolescents and adults, reporting both positive and negative effects of dig...

In the aftermath of a product failure, companies often offer a financial compensation. The present research compares the effects of equal compensation (i.e., a refund that is equivalent to the purchase price) and large overcompensation (i.e., a refund that is five times larger than the purchase price) on customer loyalty, which was hypothesized to...

Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another con...

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants...

Previous research revealed that cognitive abilities are negatively related to right-wing and prejudiced attitudes. No study has, however, investigated if emotional abilities also show such a relationship, although this can be expected based on both classic and recent literature. The aim of the present study was 2-fold: (a) to investigate the relati...

The prisoner's dilemma game is a mixed‐motive game that offers two players the simultaneous choice between a cooperative and a defective alternative. An often neglected aspect of such a binary‐choice game, however, is that in many real‐life encounters, people can choose not only to cooperate or defect, but they also have a third option: to exit the...

Mixed‐motive games represent situations that confront people with a conflict between cooperative and non‐cooperative alternatives. Despite this common basis, recent research has shown that the consistency of people's choices across different mixed‐motive games is rather low. The present research examined behavioural consistency within the same mixe...

The present study investigated the relationship between level of education and liberalization values in large, representative samples administered in 96 countries around the world (total N = 139,991). These countries show meaningful variation in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), ranging from very poor, developing countries to prosperous,...

Social-cultural and economic-hierarchical ideological attitudes have long been used to explain variation in political partisanship. We propose two additional, stable attitudes (political cynicism and ethnic prejudice) that may help explaining contemporary political alignments. In a Belgian (N = 509) and Dutch sample (N = 628), we showed that party...

Putnam’s (2007) constrict claim states that ethnic diversity has serious consequences for social cohesion, making people distrustful and leery. The present contribution extends this claim by including political cynicism and trust as side effects of diversity. Moreover, we nuance this claim by considering citizens’ social-ideological attitudes as mo...

Norm violations are ubiquitous in organizations and often result in tangible harm and a loss of trust. One possible response to enhance trust involves the provision of financial compensation. Unfortunately, little is known about the processes that underlie the effect of such a tangible response to increase trust. We employed techniques in cognitive...

In this study we analyzed the opinions of citizens of the German-speaking minority in Belgium on the linguistic conflict between the Walloons and the Flemish, as well as their attitudes towards these linguistic communities. We were especially interested in the effects of identification with the local community and disidentification with Belgium. We...

Objective: The Mental Health Continuum – Short Form is a brief scale measuring positive human functioning. The study aimed to examine the factor structure and to explore the cross cultural utility of the MHC-SF using bifactor models and exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM). Method: Using multigroup confirmatory analysis (MGCFA) we exa...

Companies sometimes employ a "lowest price or more than the difference back" policy (i.e., a price-beating guarantee). We investigated whether such a policy is more effective to attract and retain customers than when the exact price difference is promised (i.e., a price-matching guarantee). The first study revealed that about 60% of the marketers a...

Both ability and motivation aspects of cognition have been shown to relate to ethnic prejudice. In line with recent theorizing, the present study advances an integrated cognition perspective on ethnic prejudice by examining the interplay between cognitive ability (measured with the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test) and cognitive motiv...

Epistemic motives and threat have been considered important bases of rightwing authoritarianism (RWA) for a long time. Yet, the interplay between these variables has hardly been investigated. The present study therefore examined how the interaction between dispositional need for closure (NFC) and perceived external threat, in addition to their main...

Hot temperatures lead to heightened arousal. According to excitation transfer theory, arousal can increase both antisocial and prosocial behavior, depending on the context. Although many studies have shown that hot temperatures can increase antisocial behavior, very few studies have investigated the relationship between temperature and prosocial be...

Hot temperatures lead to heightened arousal. According to excitation transfer theory, arousal can increase both antisocial and prosocial behavior, depending on the context. Although many studies have shown that hot temperatures can increase antisocial behavior, very few studies have investigated the relationship between temperature and prosocial be...

Although a lot of research attention has already been devoted to the personality and emotional basis of right-wing attitudes and racial prejudice, the relationships between trait Emotional Intelligence (EI) and the latter variables have been largely neglected. In the present study conducted in a heterogeneous sample of adults (N = 419), we aim to f...

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively,...

Purpose The aim of the present research was to investigate how a negative decision outcome generated by a leader in a hasty, timely, or delayed manner impacts upon the need for, and the effectiveness of apologies to restore followers’ trust. Design/Methodology/Approach Data were collected using five studies in which the effects of timing of an inco...

Two recent meta-analytic studies addressing the relationship between cognitive style and right-wing attitudes yielded some discrepancies. We argue that these discrepancies can be accounted for when one considers the types of cognitive style measures included in those analyses. One of these analyses primarily relied on self-report measures, whereas...

The present study investigated the role of authoritarianism in the association between the actual proportion of ethnic minorities (objective diversity) within a neighborhood and majority members' subjective perception thereof (perceived diversity). Additionally, we tested how authoritarianism affects the direct and indirect relationships between ob...

In the present study, we investigated the much debated “happiness gap” between conservatives and liberals, approaching the issue from a multilevel person × context perspective. More specifically, we investigated whether this relationship depends on country-level threat. We used individual-level data for right-wing attitudes and psychological well-b...

The present research investigated a multilevel person-context interactionist framework for the relationship between right-wing ideologies and prejudice across two large, representative samples (Study 1: European Social Survey: N = 56,752; Study 2: World Values Survey: N = 74,042). Across three different operationalizations of right-wing ideology, t...

The present study investigated whether and to what extent ideological attitudes relate to moral reasoning. Specifically, in three studies we tested if Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) are associated with a general tendency to make either utilitarian (outcome-based) or deontological (principle-based) decisions...

This article presents the cross-cultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive, and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the b...

Despite the popularity of financial compensation as a means for addressing trust violations, the question whether (more) money can indeed buy trust back remains largely unexplored. In the present research, we focus on the role of violation type and compensation size. The results of a scenario study and a laboratory experiment show that financial co...

Raw data Study 2. Data file with raw data of Study 2. (TXT)

Recoded data Study 1. Dataset with recoded data of Study 1. (SAV)

Raw data Study 1. Data file with raw data of Study 1. (TXT)

Questions Study 1. Questions given to participants in Study 1. (DOCX)

Recoded data Study 2. Dataset with recoded data of Study 2. (SAV)