Eran Halperin

Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya | IDC · School of Psychology

Transforming long-term conflicts into peaceful intergroup relations is one of the most difficult challenges for humanity. Such meaningful social changes are often driven by young people. But do young people living in contexts of long-term conflicts believe that change is even possible? In a series of six studies (Ntotal = 119,671) over two decades...

The current research examines joint collective action between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, from the perspective of the latter. We hypothesize that joint action poses a dilemma which lies in the tension between perceived instrumentality of joint action (i.e., ability to promote the disadvantaged’s goals) and perceived normalization (i.e., it...

Empathy is important for resolving intergroup conflicts. However, people often tend to feel less empathy toward people who do not belong to their social group (i.e., outgroup members). We propose that this tendency is due, in part, to the belief that empathy is a limited resource. To overcome this issue, we develop an intervention synthesizing psyc...

Political segregation is an important social problem, increasing polarization and impeding effective governance. Previous work has viewed the central driver of segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others who have similar views. Here we propose that, in addition to homophily, people’s social tie decisions are driven...

While most people believe they would speak up against prejudice, many fail to do so. We identify a harmful consequence of such inaction through examining its impact on bystanders’ own prejudice. Across four studies in two countries (N = 1,003) using a behavioral paradigm and experimental pretest–posttest design, participants witnessed prejudice and...

Members of historically advantaged groups are often unwilling to support actions or policies aimed at reducing inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, even if they generally support the principle of equality. Based on past research, we suggest a self-affirmation intervention (an intervention in which people reflect on a positive tra...

Humiliation is a strong negative emotion that arises when a person is forced to internalize an unjust devaluation of the self. Based on theory positing agency as a key factor for self-esteem, we conducted three experiments to investigate whether enhancing the agentic capacity of people facing humiliating situations down-regulated the intensity of t...

We tend to associate certain type of action with certain ideologies, like we might assume that confronting prejudice towards a minority group is associated with egalitarian values. In the present research, we tested this assumption and proposed an aversive bystander effect, predicting that egalitarian values are weakly associated with confronting b...

Transforming long-term conflicts into peaceful intergroup relations is one of the most difficult challenges for humanity. Such meaningful social changes are often driven by young people. But do young people living in contexts of long-term conflicts believe that change is even possible? In a series of six studies ( N total = 119,671) over two decade...

Conspiracy theories widely influence our social and political lives. Thus, it is no surprise that in recent years much research has focused on the factors that may drive the belief in such theories. While we know that different contexts can lead to the development and amplification of conspiracy theories; those involving fear, uncertainty, and loss...

Groups in conflict can act against one another in various ways, such as inflicting physical injury upon out-group members, actively expelling them from the social sphere or denying them basic rights. While intergroup conflict literature is mostly dedicated to identifying the psychological determinants of such overt, or active, forms of intergroup h...

The coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally shifted the way human beings interact, both as individuals and groups, in the face of such a widespread outbreak. This paper seeks to investigate the effects of COVID-19 on intergroup emotions and attitudes within an intractable intergroup conflict, specifically, through the lens of the Korean conflict. Us...

Restorative justice (RJ) is oriented to respond to crime in ways that would repair individual, relational, and social harm. This study examined the relationship between type of offense and public attitudes toward RJ, in addition to the psychological mechanisms undergirding this relationship. We examined a model of three offense types (sexual, viole...

Psychological processes that hamper activism, such as activist burnout, threaten social change. We suggest that perceived emotional fit (i.e., perceiving to experience similar emotions as other disadvantaged group members) may buffer activist burnout by mitigating the deleterious effects of stressors that are associated with partaking in collective...

Like adults, children experience less empathy toward some groups compared with others. In this investigation, we propose that mothers differ in how much empathy they want their children to feel toward specific outgroups, depending on their political ideology. We suggest that how mothers want their children to feel (i.e., the motivation for their ch...

Significance The effects of recent protests for racial equality, particularly when they included violence, are currently of public and academic interest. To better understand these effects, we combine a dataset of all 2020 BlackLivesMatter protests with survey data containing measures of prejudice and support for police reform. Protests were not as...

Civilian casualties contribute to the perpetuation of intergroup conflicts through increased radicalization and hostilities, but little is known on the psychological processes that affect responses to outgroup civilian casualties. The goal of the present research was to explore two factors expected to lead group members to act more cautiously, ther...

Climate change attributable to human activities has created a global threat to humanity and the natural world. However, there is a tendency for people to view climate change as a threat primarily affecting those in far-away places and there is reluctance to engage in pro-environmental action, which is often costly. It is therefore crucial to unders...

While most people believe they would speak up against prejudice, many fail to do so. We identify a harmful consequence of such inaction through examining its impact on bystanders’ own prejudice. Across four studies in two countries (N=1003), using a behavioral paradigm and experimental pretest-posttest design, participants witnessed prejudice and d...

We examined the role that witnesses play in triggering humiliation. We hypothesized that witnesses trigger humiliation because they intensify the two core appraisals underlying humiliation: unfairness and internalization of a devaluation of the self. However, we further propose that witnesses are not a defining characteristic of humiliating situati...

Previous studies have shown that external threats, such as financial crises and natural disasters, might fuel negative attitudes, emotions, and behaviors towards outgroup members. However, it is unclear what types of outgroups are likely to be targeted when an external threat is taking its toll. In this study, we examine two types of outgroups that...

Intergroup emotions have dramatic effects on members of groups engaged in intractable conflict, and are widely established to predict various ultimate intergroup outcomes – such as aggression and hostility. However, while the role of negative intergroup emotions in intractable conflicts has gained extensive research focus in recent years, studies o...

In three studies conducted in the United States, we examined whether a perceived moral violation motivates willingness to engage in normative and more radical collective action. Based on value-protection and identity-formation models, we explored whether increased endorsement of moral convictions and relevant opinion-based group identification coul...

Research on system justification theory suggests that justifying the societal status quo decreases negative emotions, leading to less collective action. In this investigation, we propose that the degree to which negative emotions mediate the link between system justification and collective action may depend upon whether individuals tend to suppress...

We present an experimental study conducted in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that examined the effect of immersive 360° video on inducing a more critical perception of the ingroup’s actions in the conflict. An immersive experience of a simulated conflict scenario filmed from the outgroup’s point of view led to the judgment of the i...

Moral elevation is an emotional experience elicited after witnessing acts of exceptional moral goodness and involves feeling moved and inspired. Previous research has demonstrated that experiences of moral elevation can lead to increased altruism. We examined whether the benefits of moral elevation on prosocial intentions extend to the context of i...

The chapter introduces a new approach to attitude change, termed paradoxical thinking. It suggests that messages that are consistent with an individual's view, but formulated in an amplified, exaggerated, or even absurd manner, lead to an extended process of deliberative thinking and arouse lower levels of resistance compared to conventional persua...

Political segregation is a significant social problem in the US, increasing polarization, sowing division and discord, and impeding effective governance. A central driver of segregation is political homophily, the tendency to associate with others with similar political views. In the current paper we propose that, in addition to political homophily...

In this paper we provide a new perspective on the fundamental question of why long-term violent conflicts are so difficult to resolve. We point at the generational gap in hope for peace as a potential explanation for the intractability of such conflicts. In a series of large-scale studies (Ntotal = 118,843) in the context of the violent Israeli-Pal...

We present an experimental study conducted in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examined the effect of immersive 360° video on inducing a more critical perception of the ingroup’s actions in the conflict. An immersive experience of a simulated conflict scenario filmed from the outgroup’s point of view led to the judgment of the i...

How does the competitive relation between ideological groups shape group members’ emotional responses to their shared political reality? Inspired by the social identity approach, we propose that ideological in-group members adjust their emotional responses to political stimuli based on the perceived emotional response of their ideological out-group...

Political psychologists studying ideology have been increasingly examining its relationship with emotion. Much of this work has focused on potential ideological differences in the intensity of emotional experiences, leading to conflicting findings. Some work has supported the perspective according to which fundamental psychological differences exis...

In contexts of long-term conflict, it often seems like it is easier to spread despair than to instil hope. The prevalence of despair, an emotion that promotes apathy, in contexts that so desperately need hope, an emotion that promotes conciliation, calls for further investigation. One possibility is that messages of hope and despair have different...

The way people perceive and think about crime and punishment is a central aspect of normative culture and formal social control. This study aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the role played by malleability beliefs and psychological distance in the public’s punitive attitudes. To address these goals, we employed a 2X2 factorial experiment...

Collective action research tends to focus on motivations of the disadvantaged group, rather than on which tactics are effective at driving the advantaged group to make concessions to the disadvantaged. We focused on the potential of nonnormative nonviolent action as a tactic to generate support for concessions among advantaged group members who are...

While we have a rich understanding of the motivations of disadvantaged group members to act collectively with their group, especially the important role played by identification, we know less about the disadvantaged’s motivations to engage in joint action with the advantaged. This research examines the role of identification in predicting joint and...

People living in areas of intractable conflicts experience extreme negative emotions which ultimately lead to support of aggressive policies. Emotion regulation and particularly cognitive reappraisal has been found to be effective in reducing negative emotional experiences and shifting policy preferences. Therefore, it is important to develop scala...

Recent increases in intergroup tensions and violence have global negative implications and underline the need for effective interventions to ameliorate conflictual relations. Despite the ongoing trend in social psychology toward an interventionist approach, there is still a theoretical and empirical gap in personalizing intergroup interventions to...

Group-based emotions can shape group members’ behaviors and intergroup relations. Therefore, we propose that people may try to regulate emotions of outgroup members to attain ingroup goals. We call this phenomenon “motivated intergroup emotion regulation.” In four studies, conducted in both hypothetical and real-world contexts, we show that deterre...

Within contexts of oppression and struggle for social change, in which hope is constantly challenged, do disadvantaged group members still want to feel hope? If so, does this desire translate into actual hope? And does motivation for hope relate to disadvantaged individuals’ collective action tendencies? We suggest that, especially when faced with...

Double standard—that is, employing a separate set of norms according to the actor’s and observer’s identity—is common in various contexts, but has not been given much empirical attention in the context of violent conflicts. We introduce group entitlement as a predictor of moral double standard in intergroup conflict. Three studies were conducted to...

The current research examined whether for a message that is based on the paradoxical thinking principles—i.e., providing extreme, exaggerated, or even absurd views, that are congruent with the held views of the message recipients—to be effective, it needs to hit a ‘sweet spot’ and lead to a contrast effect. That is, it moderates the view of the mes...

The regulation of group-based emotions has gained scholarly attention only in recent years. In this article, we review research on group-based emotion regulation, focusing on the role of motivation and distinguishing between different emotion regulation motives in the group context. For that purpose, we first define group-based emotions and their e...

Group‐based guilt and shame are part of a wide range of moral emotions in intergroup conflicts. These emotions can potentially motivate group members to make compromises in order to promote conflict resolution, and increase support for reparations and apologies following moral transgressions committed by the in‐group. Thus, it is important to under...

A major barrier to the resolution of intergroup conflicts is the reluctance to acknowledge transgressions committed by one’s ingroup toward the outgroup. Existing research demonstrates that individuals are generally motivated to justify ingroup conduct and avoid experiencing guilt and shame about ingroup harmdoing. The current work explores the use...

When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together – whether the emotions are positive or negative, and whether the situations are online or offline – we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which p...

Countless theoretical texts and empirical investigations have attempted to point to the centrality of negative emotions as a force that motivates and sustains prolonged conflicts between societies and countries. These endeavors yielded substantial support for the dramatic influence of these conflict oriented, group-based-emotions, on critical aspec...

Countless theoretical texts and empirical investigations have attempted to point to the centrality of negative emotions as a force that motivates and sustains prolonged conflicts between societies and countries. These endeavors yielded substantial support for the dramatic influence of these conflict oriented, group-based- emotions, on critical aspe...

Perspective-taking is essential for improving intergroup relations. However, it is difficult to implement, especially in violent conflicts. Given that immersive virtual reality (VR) can simulate various points of view (POV), we examined whether it can lead to beneficial outcomes by promoting outgroup perspective-taking, even in armed conflicts. In...

In the present research, we tested whether the prospect of moral failure or moral gain can motivate (some) people to confront racism. We investigated the influence of moral loss and moral gain mindset on people’s tendency to contest racism as a function of their moral commitment to non-prejudice. Drawing on research on regulatory focus, we predicte...

The distinction between attackers and defenders might help to refine the understanding of the role of emotions in conflicts. Here we briefly discuss differences between attackers and defenders in terms of appraisals, action tendencies, emotional preferences, and brain activities. Finally, we outline how attackers and defenders may differ in their r...

The current research examines joint collective action (e.g., between Blacks and Whites) from the perspective of disadvantaged group members, for whom such action reflects a dilemma of whether to “sleep with the enemy.” Integrating insights from research on intergroup contact, helping, and collective action, we suggest that an important part of this...

We test the notion that the presence of a dual identity group, which partially shares both the ingroup and a relevant outgroup identity, can decrease intergroup prejudice. Previous research has demonstrated that such dual identity groups can act as a possible gateway between the groups that represent the respective sources of the dual identity. The...

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific...

For decades, legal formalism has held that judicial sentencing decisions should be guided by facts, not subjective variables. However, scholars and legal practitioners have long been aware of the influence of psychological factors on legal decision making. In this article we report on two studies that examined a model suggesting that belief in mall...

This study examines the conditions under which exposure to internal criticism among one's rival in conflict is effective in facilitating more positive views toward the rival. In two experiments, Jewish Israelis were exposed to a Palestinian criticizing Palestinians for violations of either “binding” or “individualizing” moral values. Exposure to Pa...

Gateway Groups are characterized by a unique social categorization which enables them to be identified with two or more groups within the context of intergroup relations. Due to their strategic situation, Gateway Groups have been found to have the potential to improve the relations between their distinct social counterparts. In this paper we attemp...

The emotion of hope has been found to play a pivotal role in intergroup conflict resolution processes. As a positive and motivating emotion, prominent group members, such as group leaders or representatives may wish to instill hope among ingroup members. One method that can be employed to instill hope is to express hope as confirmation for a specif...

Despite their pernicious effect on intergroup conflict, collateral casualties are seen as inevitable and justified by many members of the groups involved, particularly those who endorse a right-wing ideology. Drawing on social psychological literature, we examined whether a perception of commonality between in-group and out-group can be beneficial...

Emotion regulation involves activating an emotion goal (e.g., decrease negative emotions) and using an emotion regulation strategy (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) to pursue it. We propose that activating emotion goals and implementing means can independently affect emotion regulation. People are not always motivated to regulate emotions or to regulat...

The current research examines joint collective action (e.g., between Blacks and Whites), which poses a dilemma for disadvantaged group members on whether to "sleep with the enemy." Integrating insights from research on intergroup contact, helping, and collective action, we propose that much of the dilemma lies in the tension between two motivations...

Overcoming sociopsychological barriers within intergroup communications may bring forth new, practical methods for conflict resolution, particularly crucial for groups engulfed by intractable conflict. This article examines the use of humor—an extremely effective technique of persuasive communication—as one potential route whose potency in resolvin...

In this chapter, the authors put forth the proposition that group-based emotions reside at the core of extreme intergroup violence. That is, genocide is not cold; it is cruelly heartfelt. Perpetrator groups act because of specific (perceived or real) threat-induced, group-based emotions, which motivate specific destructive action tendencies. The au...

How do wars shape emotions and attitudes in intractable conflicts? In two studies conducted in the aftermath of the 2014 Gaza War in the Middle East, we tested a new theoretical model wherein the ability to regulate emotions is central in determining the influence of war exposure on emotions (i.e., group-based humiliation) and support for militancy...

The traditional understanding of the role of anger in conflicts is that it leads to aggressive actions that escalate conflict. However, recent research has found that under certain circumstances anger can have constructive effects such as increasing support for more risky conciliatory steps in negotiation. The current study aims to identify a psych...

Social problems such as intergroup conflicts, prejudice, and discrimination have a significant effect on the world’s population. Often, to facilitate constructive solutions to these problems, fundamental attitude change is needed. However, changing the beliefs and attitudes to which people strongly adhere has proven to be difficult, as these indivi...

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. It is not yet clear, however, whether and to what extent situations that activate emotional motives influence this tendency to show emotional similarity. In the present research, we examined this issue by considering emotional responses to po...

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. It is not yet clear, however, whether and to what extent situations that activate emotional motives influence this tendency to show emotional similarity. In the present research, we examined this issue by considering emotional responses to po...

We offer a functional perspective on hate, showing that hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies. Hate is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups. We hate persons and groups more because of who they are, than because of what they do. Hate has the goal to eliminate its target. Hate is especial...

Hope is viewed as a positive emotion associated with the motivation to change existing conditions. As such, it is highly relevant for social change, particularly when considering the disadvantaged position of some groups. We here propose that, in the context of asymmetrical intergroup relations, hope may actually undermine motivation for change amo...

Individuals encounter a variety of emotional challenges daily, with optimal emotion modulation requiring adaptive choice among available means of regulation. However, individuals differ in the ability to flexibly and adaptively move between engaging and disengaging emotion regulation (ER) strategies as per contextual demands, referred to as regulat...

Exposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup’s perspective. Research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants’ perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speak...