Immo Fritsche

University of Leipzig · Institute of Psychology

Citizen science has great potential to foster ecological knowledge, skills and collective action for biodiversity conservation. To date, however, there are few experimental studies of behaviour change outcomes induced by citizen science. We assessed the effects of citizen science in ecological stream monitoring on participants' individual and colle...

Radical climate protest action has emerged in recent years, partially eliciting strong negative responses in the public (e.g., toward road blocking). When do people support radical climate action? Group-based control theory proposes that individuals may restore a threatened sense of personal control by demonstrating agency through their group, that...

Earth is facing a rapid change in biodiversity, posing significant threats to human health and ecosystem stability. Concurrently, increased urbanization is causing humans, especially children in urban areas, to grow more disconnected from nature, resulting in a lack of perceptual and learning capabilities in nature-based domains. Early childhood ex...

Global environmental crises require a swift green transformation of organizations, and increased employee green behavior (EGB) is a crucial avenue. EGB refers to a collective (the work organization), however it is so far largely unclear how social identity factors contribute to EGB. Based on the social identity model of pro-environmental action (SI...

Rechts-konservative politische Ideologie wird häufig mit dem Widerstand gegen Veränderung und der Bewahrung bestehender gesellschaftlicher Hierarchien und Strukturen gleichgesetzt (Jost, Pelham, Sheldon & Ni Sullivan, 2003). Allerdings wirbt beispielsweise die in Teilen rechtsextreme Partei "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD) mit dem gesellschaftli...

How does climate change threat affect attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities and climate change refugees? We show that threatening climate change can have deep psychological effects even among social majority groups in relatively prosperous and peaceful societies. Using three survey experiments with self-identified White British particip...

Low-cost public transport tickets (LCTT) are becoming common offers to promote sustainable transportation, alleviate inflation, and improve public transport (PT) accessibility in urban areas. However, little research is available to quantify and understand the environmental and behavioral effects of the implementation of such tickets. In this compr...

Führen Bedrohungen des Kontrollgefühls automatisch und in jedem Fall zur Zunahme von Vorurteilen und Gewalt? In anderen Worten: ist eine voranschreitende Radikalisierung unausweichlich, sobald Individuen das „Förderband“ der Bedrohungswahrnehmung betreten haben? Entgegen dieser pessimistischen Annahme hat das sozialpsychologische Team des "Radikale...

Soil is central to the complex interplay among biodiversity, climate, and society. This paper examines the interconnectedness of soil biodiversity, climate change, and societal impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for integrated solutions. Human‐induced biodiversity loss and climate change intensify environmental degradation, threatening human well...

Collective action to protect the environment is increasingly moving into the focus of environmental psychology. Also policy makers are well-advised to consider the dynamics of collective environmental action as a vehicle to swift ecological transformations of societies. A sense of collective environmental agency (vs. treating citizens as reluctant...

Gesellschaftliche Krisen gelten als wegbereitende Bedingungen populistischer Bewegungen und dadurch ausgelöster gesellschaftlicher Spaltungen und Ausschlüsse. Häufig wird angenommen, dass persönliches Bedrohungserleben die Empfänglichkeit für populistische Positionen erhöht. Aus Perspektive der empirisch-experimentellen sozialpsychologischen Forsch...

Human activities and their consequences, such as environmental pollution, the exploitation of resources or deforestation, are major causes of biodiversity loss. However, humans depend on a biologically diverse and healthy environment in many ways, as it provides access to clean water, air and food. The loss of biodiversity is an ecological crisis t...

In many Western societies, conflicts between non-Muslims and Muslims are fueled by the perception of Muslim identity and the national identity as a supposed pair of opposites. It can be assumed that this distinct categorization into ingroup and outgroup can reinforce the effect of salient threat to control on increased ingroup bias and can thus lea...

Having a vision and being able to imagine socially and ecologically just alternatives can motivate people for societal transformation. However, which psychological processes drive this link between the mental accessibility of societal alternatives and collective action? We hypothesized that collective efficacy beliefs and politicized identification...

Chronic illness has negative impacts beyond those on physical health. In particular, because it is often experienced as uncontrollable, chronic illness might reduce people's general sense of personal control and, subsequently, personal well-being. Drawing on recent theory and research, we proposed and tested in four experiments (N total = 1323) a p...

Energy community setups , energy visions and collective agency as predictors of energy citizenship and pro-environmental spillover Abstract In this deliverable, we present nine studies with a total of N = 5,175 participants that investigated the psychological questions of what role the setup of energy communities plays in encouraging energy citizen...

Collective authoritarian responses to threat might differ depending on whether people trust collective authorities in reducing threat. Thus, we tested the differential effects of epidemic threat on three facets of right‐wing authoritarianism, in Germany (a country with high authorities' efficacy in responses to COVID‐19) and Poland (low authorities...

Climate protection is a collective project. However, most previous research on people’s pro-climate behavior ignores the collective dimension, looking at personal private-sphere behavior and considering personal cost-benefit predictors only. The present paper transcends this individualistic perspective by addressing behaviors that target collective...

Unabhängig von der Frage nach der Legitimität von Radikalisierung stellt der so bezeichnete Prozess aus psychologischer Perspektive eine zunehmende Gefährdung des Selbst und der Anderen dar. Radikalisierung beschreibt das Aufgehen von Individuen in radikalen Gruppen und kann in Hass und Gewalt gegen die Mitglieder andersdenkender Gruppen zum Ausdru...

Personal pro-environmental action has often been explained in terms of personal cost-benefit analyses and personal capabilities. However, given that only collectives and not single individuals can effectively address large-scale environmental crises, such as mass extinction of species, peoples’ pro-environmental motivation might emerge from their p...

Previous research has mainly considered economic factors and personal psychological factors (e.g., personal pro-environmental attitudes) as determinants of investment behavior for renewable energies. However, less is known about how social identities, i.e. the human capacity to think and act as a member of a social group, can shape green investment...

Energy citizenship is an emerging concept in policy and practice. Yet scientific theorising around energy citizenship is scarce, and rarely bundled in interdisciplinary discourse. In this article, we present an interdisciplinary definition of energy citizenship as people's rights to and responsibilities for a just and sustainable energy transition....

People desire agentic representations of their personal and collective selves, such as their own nation. When national agency is put into question, this should increase their inclination to restore it, particularly when they simultaneously lack perceptions of personal control. In this article, we test this hypothesis of group-based control in the c...

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über die Forschung zu psychologischen Prozessen im Zusammenhang mit gesellschaftlicher Integration. Wir stellen zunächst die kognitiven und motivationalen Grundlagen von Stereotypen, Vorurteilen und Diskriminierung dar und gehen dann auf Modelle zur Erklärung von Intergruppenkonflikten ein, bevor wir uns Intergru...

Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypo...

Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypo...

Research has shown that when control is threatened, people are more likely to turn to groups that are perceived as particularly agentic. However, the question of under what conditions control threat can mobilize individuals to join problem-focused, activist groups remains unresolved. In the present research, we propose that strength of involvement...

Research has shown that when control is threatened, people are more likely to turn to groups that are perceived as particularly agentic. However, the question of under what conditions control threat can mobilize individuals to join problem-focused, activist groups remains unresolved. In the present research, we propose that strength of involvement...

How do people maintain a sense of control when they realize the noncontingencies in their personal life and their strong interdependence with other people? Why do individuals continue to act on overwhelming collective problems, such as climate change, that are clearly beyond their personal control? Group-based control theory proposes that it is soc...

This paper shows that interventions based on social norms and on increasing the visibility of people's decisions to others (“decision observability”) present promising pathways of generating public support for renewable energy development. In a laboratory experiment (n = 300), we show that social norms and decision observability increase support fo...

In this deliverable, we develop a viable concept of energy citizenship, on which scientific, political and practical debates on energy citizenship and energy communities can build upon. First, we introduce an interdisciplinary definition of energy citizenship that is parsimonious, unambiguous, and translatable into scientific definitions: Energy ci...

Effectively fighting global warming requires large groups to engage in concerted action. In the present review article we aim to understand how human appraisals and responses to the challenge of climate change are shaped by social identities (i.e. people’s membership in specific social groups). We first describe the recent Social Identity Model of...

Objectives: Social-cure research has shown that ingroup identification can be beneficial for personal health and well-being. Initial evidence for healthy participants suggests that this might be due to group membership providing a sense of personal control. In this research, we investigate this pathway for chronically ill patients, assuming that a...

Identity can improve our understanding of personal climate action, particularly when climate action becomes an expression of a person’s self. However, it is unclear which kind of self or identity is most relevant. Building on a comprehensive series of eight meta-analyses (using data from 188 published articles, N = 414,282 participants) this resear...

In times of threat people often turn to social groups to fulfill various needs. In situations where this threat is related to people’s personal sense of control, the model of group-based control provides a social-identity-based account of why thinking and acting in terms of group membership should become more likely to occur. We set out to extend t...

Understanding how psychological processes drive human energy choices is an urgent, and yet relatively under-investigated, need for contemporary society. A knowledge gap still persists on the links between psychological factors identified in earlier studies and people's behaviors in the energy domain. This research applies a meta-analytical procedur...

Der Beitrag erörtert den Zusammenhang von Rechtspopulismus und gesellschaftlichem Zusammenhalt. Es wird das Verhältnis von Rechtspopulismus und Rechtsradikalismus dargelegt und Befunde der soziologischen und sozialpsychologischen Forschung über Persönlichkeit, Identität, Wahlverhalten und religiöse Bedrohungsgefühle präsentiert.

Die zentrale Forschungsfrage des RIRA-Projektes lautet: Welche kollektiven Interventionsansätze können bei der Radikalisierung und Co-Radikalisierung Jugendlicher und post-adoleszenter Muslim:innen und Nicht-Muslim:innen identifiziert werden? Der vorliegende Literaturbericht gibt einen Einblick in die Inhalte, Forschungsfragen und Hypothesen der ve...

Effectively protecting the climate requires the action of groups. In the present review article we aim to understand when individuals turn into collective climate actors. We first discuss pertinent models of group-based action and their relevance for explaining climate action. Then, we review recent research on how collective climate action is driv...

Blaming immigrants seems to be in part motivated by the need for control. However, three alternative explanations have been proposed as to why blaming bolsters feelings of control. First, blaming may restore a sense of an orderly world in which negative events can be attributed to a clear cause (causal attribution). Second, blaming others may stren...

The world faces one of its greatest challenges in climate change. As a global challenge, climate change demands a global response. A psychological approach with the goal to motivate large groups to engage in concerted action will need both, a perspective focused on individual factors and a perspective focused on the collective factors. The social i...

Die Klimakrise spitzt sich zu, der Klimawandel wird immer stärker spürbar. Warum gelingt es vielfach trotzdem nicht, dringend notwendige Eindämmungsmaßnahmen einzuleiten und zu handeln? Die Autorinnen und Autoren beleuchten aus psychologischer und interdisziplinärer Sicht die Hindernisse, die einer produktiven Auseinandersetzung mit der Krise im We...

International survey of the ECHOES project is a large survey dataset than contains responses from 31 countries: EU-28 (2018) + 3 countries. The dataset contains raw data in four different formats: dta, rdata, sav and xlsx. Codebook and survey questionnaire are included.

Vorrede | Die Besonderheit der menschlichen Art scheint auf zwei scheinbar entgegengesetzten Polen zu ruhen: Dem elaborierten Erkennen des Selbst und einer ausgeprägten Sozialität. Unsere kognitiven Fähigkeiten bedingen nicht nur ein komplexes Bewusstsein unser Selbst, sondern auch die ausgereifte Simulation eines möglichen Selbst, mit all ihren Au...

This Deliverable elaborates a consolidated scientific knowledge base stemming from the correlation of the main findings obtained throughout the ECHOES project with the existing literature in order to advance consensus on the key factors and relationships driving (or meaningfully influencing) specific energy choices and related behavioural patterns...

Contemporary societies seem to be obsessed with history. This is reflected in the popularity of historical books, films, and reenactments. In our research, we aimed to assess the specific types of content that interest people when exploring their national histories and the psychological factors motivating such explorations. Following the two-dimens...

Humans’ relationship with nature is characterized by ambivalence. Although we value nature as a source of material resources and habitat, an object of care, and provider of identity, nature, and natural processes have the potential to threaten predictability and control, and to remind us of our own mortality. Thus, terror management concerns lead p...

Declining natural resources or climate change are examples of global challenges that characterize our globalized world. A sustainable human cohabitation depends on global intergroup cooperation and joint efforts to solve these crises. Intergroup contact tends to reduce intergroup prejudice and can facilitate such intergroup cooperation. Another lin...

Gordon Allport (1935), einer der Gründerväter der modernen Sozialpsychologie, bezeichnete das Konstrukt der „Einstellung“ als „the most distinctive and indispensable concept in […] social psychology“. Bis heute hat dieses Konstrukt wenig von seiner frühen Attraktivität verloren. Die Erfassung von Einstellungen ist ein verbreitetes Ziel der Meinungs...

Wodurch entstehen Gruppen und durch welche Merkmale zeichnen sie sich aus? In diesem Kapitel werden Merkmale und Strukturen sozialer Gruppen eingeführt. Hier wird eine Verbindung zu vorherigen Kapiteln hergestellt, indem die Rolle von sozialen Normen sowie des geteilten Wissens bei der Formierung und Stabilisierung von Gruppen hervorgehoben wird (z...

Prozesse des Denkens und der Informationsverarbeitung erklären wie Menschen ihre Urteile bilden, wie sie Wissen aus dem Gedächtnis abrufen und wie sie dieses Wissen in einer gegebenen Situation integrieren. In diesem Kapitel wird die Unterscheidung zwischen intuitiven und kontrollierten Prozessen eingeführt. Es werden verschiedene Urteils- und Ents...

In diesem Kapitel stellen wir die zentralen Begriffe wie Vorurteile, soziale Diskriminierung und soziale Stereotype vor und führen in klassische und moderne Ansätze zu ihrer Erklärung ein. Es werden sowohl persönlichkeitsorientierte Ansätze, die Theorie des realistischen Gruppenkonflikts als auch die Theorie der sozialen Identität vorgestellt. Ein...

Menschen sind grundlegend soziale Wesen. Die Umwelt, mit der wir uns auseinanderzusetzen haben und an die wir uns anpassen, sind andere Menschen. Unser Denken, Entscheiden, Verhalten und unsere Emotionen und Motivationen beziehen sich auf Personen (uns und andere) und werden durch diese Anderen beeinflusst. Sozial geteiltes Wissen regelt Interaktio...

Ihr Selbstkonzept ermöglicht es Menschen, zu erkennen, wo sie stehen und wer sie sind. Der Austausch mit der sozialen Umwelt stellt eine der wichtigsten Quellen des Selbstkonzepts dar, welche im Kapitel vorgestellt werden. Hierbei geht es um die Selbstwahrnehmung durch Beobachtung des Selbst oder der Reaktionen Anderer, um soziale Vergleiche sowie...

Anhand von Beispielen werden gängige Methoden der Sozialpsychologie möglichst anschaulich eingeführt. Das Kapitel wird grundlegende Begriffe (Theorie, Konstrukt, Variable, Hypothese usw.) erläutern, gängige Untersuchungsstrategien (Experiment, Quasi-Experiment, Umfrageforschung, qualitative Forschung) vorstellen und Risiken für die Qualität der For...

In diesem Kapitel betrachten wir Prozesse der Interaktion zwischen Personen sowie deren Beziehungen untereinander. Wir gehen davon aus, dass Gesellung (Affiliation) und Zugehörigkeit ein menschliches Grundbedürfnis darstellen und sozialer Ausschluss von Menschen als bedrohlich erlebt wird. Wir befassen uns dann mit den Prozessen zwischenmenschliche...

Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen von Menschen sind stark davon abhängig was andere denken und tun. In diesem Kapitel stellen wir diese Prozesse sozialen Einflusses vor. Hierbei geht es zunächst um grundlegende Mechanismen der Einstellungsänderung – zumeist infolge gezielter Überzeugungs- oder anderer Beeinflussungsversuche. Anschließend diskutier...

In diesem Kapitel wird die soziale Kognitionsforschung als wichtige Perspektive innerhalb der psychologischen Sozialpsychologie vorgestellt. Untersucht werden das Denken über soziale Objekte (z. B. Personen) oder Situationen (z. B. Konflikte) und das Denken, das in sozialen Interaktionen (z. B. Beeinflussungsversuchen) stattfindet oder innerhalb so...

For ensuring the well‐being of groups, it needs people who deviate from ingroup norms that harm the group (“loyal deviance”). Qualifying previous results that loyal deviants have to be highly identified with the group, we hypothesize and show that this is only true when group members at the same time feel that they are highly prototypical for the g...

Romantic relationships and offspring are discussed as anxiety buffers in terror management processes. We examined the relationship between these possible buffers and tested whether romantic relationships reduce existential threat due to reproduction opportunities or if they represent a distinct anxiety buffer. Contrary to our initial expectations,...

Dieses Buch führt in knapper und gut lesbarer Form durch die wesentlichen Bereiche der Sozialpsychologie. Der Text soll grundlegendes Wissen einfach und verständlich zugänglich machen. Die Themenbereiche umfassen Gegenstand und Geschichte sowie Methoden der Sozialpsychologie, Selbst und Identität, die Konstruktion der sozialen Realität und deren Pr...

Large-scale environmental crises are genuinely collective phenomena: they usually result from collective, rather than personal, behavior and how they are cognitively represented and appraised is determined by collectively shared interpretations (e.g., differing across ideological groups) and based on concern for collectives (e.g., humankind, future...

We tested the hypothesis that climate change threat increases group-based cognition and action tendencies. As ingroups can provide extended primary control, we expected climate change threat to increase conformity with ingroup norms and group protective behavior. In three studies (N = 404), we experimentally manipulated climate change threat (Studi...

This report forms the basis for further research in ECHOES and gives at the same time an overview about the state-of-the-art. Based on a literature review with an initial screening of several thousand sources (and 597 sources reviewed), research from all three ECHOES research perspectives and technology foci were mapped and research gaps identified...

Testing a model of group-based control, we hypothesized that, as a response to threatened control, people strive for collective agency, leading to increased in-group norm conformity. To distinguish this mechanism from possible conservative shift we investigated liberal norms (i.e., change and anti-right-wing norms). In a field experiment (N = 82),...

Economic threat (e.g., low or precarious socio-economic status) motivates social psychological responses to restore or maintain a sense of control and self-esteem, thwarted under conditions of personal or collective economic crisis. We review recent research showing that these processes elicit personal or collective attitudes and action tendencies...

Psychological threat has been found to facilitate norm compliance (e.g. Jonas, 2013). In order to advance the understanding of these effects, we propose a closer investigation of norm-specific attentional vigilance after threat. To investigate this process, we combined a paradigm by Aarts & Dijksterhuis (2003) with a manipulation of mortality salie...

Reminders of existential threat increase people’s desire for offspring. In line with terror management theory, we explain these effects by the motivation to transcend the self via offspring which complements biological accounts of reproduction motivation under threat. Accordingly, Study 1 shows that mortality salience increases self-transcendence m...

Self-continuity – the sense that one’s past, present, and future are meaningfully connected – is considered a defining feature of personal identity. However, bases of self-continuity may depend on cultural beliefs about personhood. In multilevel analyses of data from 7287 adults from 55 cultural groups in 33 nations, we tested a new tripartite theo...

According to threat-general perspectives, existentially threatening prospects such as the inevitability of mortality or uncontrollability represent motivational discrepancies that activate the behavioral inhibition system (BIS). The aim of the present paper is to test this claim using neuroimaging and neurophysiological methods. In Study 1, we used...

Economic crises can threaten individuals’ sense of control. At the same time, these crises often result in collective responses, such as class-based protest (e.g., the 99%), but also nationalism or xenophobia. We investigated how personal consequences of economic crises lead to both intragroup and intergroup responses and the role of control for th...

Coping with Lack of Control in a Social World offers an integrated view of cutting-edge research on the effects of control deprivation on social cognition. The book integrates multi-method research demonstrating how various types of control deprivation, related not only to experimental settings but also to real life situations of helplessness, can...

Previous research has shown that ingroup norms influence intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior, most notably for individuals highly identified with a group. However, intriguingly, identification may itself lead people to exaggerate descriptive pro-environmental ingroup norms to enhance positive distinctiveness of their ingroup. We inve...

Variations in acquiescence and extremity pose substantial threats to the validity of cross-cultural research that relies on survey methods. Individual and cultural correlates of response styles when using 2 contrasting types of response mode were investigated, drawing on data from 55 cultural groups across 33 nations. Using 7 dimensions of self-oth...

Markus and Kitayama's (1991) theory of independent and interdependent self-construals had a major influence on social, personality, and developmental psychology by highlighting the role of culture in psychological processes. However, research has relied excessively on contrasts between North American and East Asian samples, and commonly used self-r...

Social identification provides individuals with a sense of identity by fostering their underlying motives for self-esteem, belonging, epistemic equilibrium, and control. In the current chapter, we review findings showing that threat to these motives on both the personal and the collective level of the self leads to an unpleasant stadium of anxious...

Drawing upon a social identity approach, three studies focus on the elicitors of intergroup admiration by investigating the relationship between admiration for an outgroup and this outgroup’s prototypicality for a superordinate category. In Study 1 (N = 314), we find empirical support for a positive association between prototypicality and admiratio...

Contemplating the inevitability of one’s own death can deeply affect a person’s subjective sense of control, eliciting symbolic responses to restore control through cultural worldview defense. Re-search supporting this perspective has shown that reminders of one’s own death (i.e., uncontrol-lable death) can increase worldview defense, whereas self-...