Eran Halperin

Reichman University | IDC · School of Psychology

Although much is known about why people engage in collective action participation (e.g., politicized identity, group-based anger), little is known about the psychological consequences of such participation. For example, can participation in collective action facilitate attitude moralization (e.g., moralize their attitudes on the topic)? Based on th...

How does the rise of ideologically-extreme leaders affect attitudes and beliefs among their supporters? Previous research on paradoxical thinking suggests that when individuals are exposed to a radicalized version of their held beliefs, they moderate them in response. However, it is yet unknown whether, how, and among whom, such moderation occurs i...

Exposure to conflict‐related violence is one of the most harmful consequences of living amidst a violent intergroup conflict. While its potential significance is profound, the impact of exposure to conflict‐related violence on intergroup empathy remains largely unexplored. The current paper aims to address this gap by proposing political ideology a...

What is hope, and how can we measure it? These questions have occupied the minds of hope scholars across disciplines. This article outlines a comprehensive approach to understanding hope: the Bidimensional Model of Hope. Building on the standard definition of hope, the bidimensional model explores hope as the intersection between wishes (desires, a...

Political segregation is a pressing issue, particularly on social media platforms. Recent research suggests that one driver of segregation is political acrophily—people's preference for others in their political group who have more extreme (rather than more moderate) political views. However, acrophily has been found in lab experiments, where peopl...

Experiencing repression creates intense emotions and raises dilemmas about handling political action to achieve social change. Past studies suggest that mainly group-based emotions are associated with support for violent collective action while the exact influence of individual emotions remains unclear. This research compares the association of ind...

Mental perspectives can sometimes be changed by psychological interventions. For instance, when applied in the context of intergroup conflicts, interventions, such as the paradoxical thinking intervention, may unfreeze ingrained negative outgroup attitudes and thereby promote progress toward peacemaking. Yet, at present, the evaluation of intervent...

Intragroup empathy is vital for resilience. However, it is often impaired in advantaged-dominated environments when one adopts advantaged-group characteristics to climb the social ladder. The current work examines contextual factors that may affect intragroup empathy: the motivation behind adopting the advantaged-group characteristics, and negative...

Bakker and Lelkes (2024) point at a critical gap in research on affective polarization: the limited understanding of its affective components, mainly due to the reliance on a unidimensional operationalisation of affect in affective polarization. They advocate for a broader approach to study affect, integrating explicit and implicit measures, and ca...

The present study explores the impact of nonviolent communication (NVC) intervention on advantaged group members’ actual participation in collective action on behalf of disadvantaged outgroups, also known as solidarity‐based collective action (SBCA). It also examines the mediating role of hope and empathy in this process. Using an experimental long...

Growing affective polarization, or animosity between competing ideological groups, threatens to tear apart democratic societies worldwide. In nations that are facing external conflicts, the threat arising from these conflicts may boost internal cohesion and potentially reduce the internal threat of fragmentation. However, in the current study, we a...

While some studies show ideological asymmetry in outgroup bias between rightists and leftists, those studies often target an ideologically biased outgroup. Here, we bypass this issue by targeting the ideological outgroups (rightists for leftists, and leftists for rightists). We rely on a magnetoencephalography‐based approach delineating function‐sp...

Previous research on group‐based hope has predominantly focused on positive intergroup outcomes, such as peace and harmony. In this paper, we demonstrate that hope experienced towards group‐centric political outcomes, such as a victory in a conflict and defeating the enemy, can be detrimental to peace. In Study 1, conducted among Israeli Jews, hope...

The experience of privilege can trigger psychological conflict among advantaged group members. Nonetheless, little work has explored strategies that advantaged group members use to manage their identities as privileged actors. Building on Knowles et al.’s framework and theories of intergroup relations, we address the conceptualization and measureme...

Affective polarization (AP), the increased negative affect between opposing ideological groups, is a growing concern in Western democracies. While often attributed to mutual hatred, no empirical research has thus far examined the role of different discrete negative emotions underlying it. This research investigates the unique association between a...

In ethnically and linguistically diverse societies, disadvantaged groups often face pressures to acquire and speak the advantaged group’s language to achieve social inclusion and economic mobility. This work investigates how using the advantaged group’s language affects disadvantaged group members’ in-group pride and collective self-esteem, relativ...

While some studies show ideological asymmetry in outgroup bias between rightists and leftists, those studies often target an ideologically biased outgroup. Here, we bypass this issue by targeting the ideological outgroups (rightists for leftists, and leftists for rightists). We rely on a magnetoencephalography-based approach delineating function-sp...

Israel’s year-long protest calling for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resignation created an opportunity to examine unique factors influencing sustained collective action (SCA; i.e., repeated participation in social movement action for the same cause). As little is known about how to explain such dedication, we compared a well-established set of predic...

Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt interpersonal closeness. 108 participants were ass...

In intergroup conflicts, emotion regulation interventions can decrease negative intergroup emotions and increase support for concessions. However, it is usually infeasible to provide emotion regulation interventions to everyone in a population of interest. This raises a “spill over” question about the relationship between the proportion of individu...

Everyday expression of prejudice continues to pose a social challenge across societies. We tend to assume that to the extent people are egalitarian, they are more likely to confront prejudice—but this might not necessarily be the case. We tested this assumption in two countries (US and Hungary) among majority members of society, using a behavioral...

Cross-party violence – violence between opposing partisans – is a growing concern worldwide. Understanding the predictors of the legitimization of violence against political opponents is thus becoming a vital goal. In this work, we propose two potential explanatory frameworks: affective polarization and low non-violent group efficacy. The first ref...

Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, ab...

Parents vary in the extent to which they want their children to feel empathy toward different groups. In the current investigation, we tested whether Jewish–Israeli mothers’ motivation to have their children feel group-based empathy toward members of their ingroup (Jews) and outgroup (Arabs) differed as a function of the types of group identificati...

In ethnolinguistically diverse societies, disadvantaged groups often face immense pressure to acquire and speak the language of the advantaged group to achieve social inclusion and economic mobility. This work investigates the impact on disadvantaged group members' ingroup pride and self-esteem when they use the language of the advantaged group and...

Defueling violent inter‐group escalation as it erupts is a major quest for scholars and change agents as it may prevent casualties and further aggression between warring parties. In May 2021, Israel experienced an unprecedented outbreak of ethnic violence between its Jewish and Arab citizens, causing fatalities on both sides and hundreds wounded. D...

Intergroup prejudice is pervasive in many contexts worldwide, leading to discrimination and conflict. Existing research suggests that prejudice is acquired at an early age and that durably improving intergroup relations is extremely challenging, often requiring intense interventions. Building on existing research in social psychology and inspired b...

Nations mired in prolonged conflict develop and disseminate societal beliefs to address society's needs. These beliefs are also used to garner support in the international arena. Two key beliefs commonly voiced to the international community by leaders of rival parties concern the threats posed to their nation and their nation's aspiration for peac...

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...

Political segregation is a pressing social issue, particularly on social media platforms. Previous re-search suggests that one driver of online segregation is political homophily, people’s preference for others who share their political views. Here we tested the idea that another driver of online segrega-tion is political acrophily, people’s prefer...

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...

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...

Conspiracy theories widely influence our social and political lives. A recent example is the broad impact such theories had on government’s efforts to halt the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that context, public’s compliance and willingness to get vaccinated was found to be substantially and negatively affected by the belief in conspiracy theo...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...