Iris Žeželj

Iris Žeželj
University of Belgrade · Department of Psychology

PhD

About

169
Publications
90,367
Reads
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2,717
Citations
Introduction
I am currently preoccupied with irrational/epistemologically suspect beliefs, especially in the domain of health, and their relation to questionable health practices that can be deceptive or downright dangerous.
Additional affiliations
July 2016 - December 2016
University of Belgrade
Position
  • Principal Investigator
Description
  • Building regional excellence in social identity and intergroup research
June 2016 - present
University of Belgrade
Position
  • MC member
Description
  • Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories
September 2014 - July 2016
University of Belgrade
Position
  • Principal Investigator
Description
  • Correlates of complex and inclusive social identities in Western Balkan youth (www.sibyouth.org)

Publications

Publications (169)
Article
Direct contact between members of ethnic groups is proven to reduce intergroup prejudice. Recent research, however, explores the effects of alternative types of contact, amongst them via social networks in virtual space. This is especially important for e.g. post-conflict societies in which there is limited opportunity for direct contact between th...
Preprint
Full-text available
This is the accepted version of the article: Lazić, A., & Žeželj, I. (2021). A systematic review of narrative interventions: Lessons for countering anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and misinformation. Public Understanding of Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625211011881 Even if a small portion of the population refuses vaccination due to a...
Article
Amidst the flow of conspiracy theories (CTs) about the COVID-19 pandemic, many were logically incompatible. We aimed to map the psychological profile of their endorsers. Upon pretesting for familiarity and logical incompatibility, we choose eight pairs of contradictory COVID-19 CTs. Across three studies, a substantial portion of respondents (40%–42...
Article
Full-text available
Health care policies often rely on public cooperation, especially during a health crisis. However, a crisis is also a period of uncertainty and proliferation of health-related advice: while some people adhere to the official recommendations, others tend to avoid them and resort to non-evidence based, pseudoscientific practices. People prone to the...
Preprint
Full-text available
People resort to various questionable health practices to preserve or regain health - they intentionally do not adhere to medical recommendations (e.g., self-medicate or modify the prescribed therapies;iNAR), or use traditional/complementary/alternative (TCAM) medicine. As retrospective reports overestimate adherence and suffer from recall and desi...
Article
Full-text available
A growing body of evidence suggests that questionable health behaviors- not following medical recommendations and resorting to non-evidence based treatments—are more frequent than previously thought, and that they seem to have strong psychological roots. We thus aimed to: 1) document the lifetime prevalence of intentional non-adherence to medical r...
Article
When a multiethnic state, such as the former Yugoslavia, dissolves in a violent ethnic‐based conflict, new generations grow up on one‐sided historical narratives. While there is plenty of evidence of how appropriating such narratives delegitimises outgroups, studies on how young people coordinate diverse group narratives are lacking. To address thi...
Article
Full-text available
Despite assumptions that people strive for consistency between their beliefs, endorsement of mutually incompatible ones is not rare - a tendency we have previously labelled doublethink, by borrowing from Orwell. In an attempt to understand the nature of doublethink and the underlying mechanism that enables incompatible beliefs to coexist, we conduc...
Preprint
The proportion of the population who are vaccinated against an infectious disease is significant – not only because vaccination keeps the virus from spreading, but also because learning about how many members of one’s community have decided to get vaccinated has been shown to affect individual vaccination intention. In three preregistered online ex...
Preprint
Background: Traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) encompasses a wide range of healthcare practices that are typically not part of “conventional” medicine and that are widely used in general populations. The aim of the study was to test for the most appropriate latent structure of a comprehensive instrument measuring TCAM use an...
Preprint
While irrational beliefs cluster together, their content differs widely, from beliefs about collective memories shaping biological properties (pseudoscientific) to those about premonition (extrasensory). This difference might extend further - they might reflect similar thinking dispositions, but be differently embedded in worldviews (pseudoscientif...
Article
Full-text available
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a shift toward a more traditional division of labor–one where women took greater responsibility for household tasks and childcare than men. We tested whether this regressive shift was more acutely perceived and experienced by women in countries with greater gender equality. Cross-cultural longitudinal survey d...
Preprint
Despite assumptions that people strive for consistency between their beliefs, endorsement of mutually incompatible ones (so-called doublethink) is not rare. In an attempt to understand the nature of doublethink and the underlying mechanism that enables incompatible beliefs to coexist, we conducted two preregistered studies (total N=691). While doub...
Preprint
Full-text available
Irrational beliefs encompass a broad set of beliefs that lack verifiable empirical evidence and contradict scientific principles, often grouped into conspiratorial, pseudoscientific, and paranormal domains. This paper investigated whether these beliefs are rooted in a set of cognitive biases. Across four studies, low socioeconomic status, right-win...
Conference Paper
Background: In the REASON4HEALTH project, we explored the structure, prevalence, and psychological factors predicting intentional non-adherence to official medical recommendations (iNAR) and the use of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TCAM) in Serbia. Methods: Focus groups with clinicians and TCAM practitioners and a literature...
Article
Full-text available
Scientism proposes science to be an all-powerful human enterprise, able to answer not only all practical but also philosophical or moral questions. We are taking a psychological approach to scientism, studying uncritical trust in science and uncritical trust in scientists as a part of a unique attitudinal tendency. Our novel measure assesses both k...
Article
Full-text available
Virus mitigation behavior has been and still is a powerful means to fight the COVID-19 pandemic irrespective of the availability of pharmaceutical means (e.g., vaccines). We drew on health behavior theories to predict health-protective (coping-specific) responses and hope (coping non-specific response) from health-related cognitions (vulnerability,...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction We will launch a national survey in Serbia to document the prevalence of two types of questionable health behaviours: (1) intentional non-adherence to medical recommendations and (2) use of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine practices, as well as the relation between the two. We will also investigate their psychologica...
Article
Full-text available
People resort to various questionable health practices to preserve or regain health - they intentionally do not adhere to medical recommendations (e.g. self-medicate or modify the prescribed therapies; iNAR), or use traditional/complementary/alternative (TCAM) medicine. As retrospective reports overestimate adherence and suffer from recall and desi...
Article
Full-text available
To describe how Serbian online media cover the topic of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TM/CAM), we conducted a content analysis of 182 articles from six news and six magazine websites, published July–December 2021. Biologically based treatments, predominantly herbal products framed as Serbian or Russian folk medicine, were th...
Article
Full-text available
Psychologicalresearchonthepredictorsofconspiracytheorizing—explainingimpor-tant social and political events or circumstances as secret plots by malevolentgroups—has flourished in recent years. However, research has typically examinedonly a small number of predictors in one, or a small number of, national con-texts. Such approaches make it difficult...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives We aimed to (1) develop a novel instrument, suitable for the general population, capturing intentional non-adherence (iNAR), consisting of non-adherence to prescribed therapy, self-medication and avoidance of seeking medical treatment; (2) differentiate it from other forms of non-adherence, for example, smoking; and (3) relate iNAR to pa...
Preprint
Full-text available
We will launch a national survey in Serbia to document the prevalence of two types of questionable health behaviors: 1) intentional non-adherence to medical recommendations (iNAR) and 2) use of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) practices, as well as the relation between the two. We will also investigate their psychological...
Article
Full-text available
Socially desirable responding (SDR) is usually treated as a “noise” in psychological research, to be controlled for by creating certain conditions for respondents. We tested a range of cues aimed to decrease/ increase SDR to be applied/avoided in selection or recruitment. To decrease it, we developed two novel procedures: one inspired by the bogus...
Chapter
Full-text available
Although misinformation is not a new problem, questions about its prevalence, its public impact, and how to combat it have taken on new urgency. An obvious solution to the problem of misinformation is to offer corrections (or debunkings) designed to clarify what is true and what is false. But corrections are not a panacea. Given the scope of the mi...
Article
Full-text available
Some public officials have expressed concern that policies mandating collective public health behaviors (e.g., national/regional “lockdown”) may result in behavioral fatigue that ultimately renders such policies ineffective. Boredom, specifically, has been singled out as one potential risk factor for noncompliance. We examined whether there was emp...
Book
Full-text available
Ova monografija je osmišljena kao klasični deskriptivni pregled rezultata istraživanja društvenih i političkih stavova mladih. Trudili smo se da ove rezultate provučemo kroz prizmu najaktuelnijih teorijskih, metodoloških i empirijskih saznanja iz oblasti istraživanja socijalnih identiteta i društveno-političkih stavova, kako uopšte tako i u lokalno...
Article
Full-text available
Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...
Preprint
Despite insufficient evidence base for some of its practices, traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TCAM) use is rapidly growing; psychological roots of this trend are still under-studied. Based on previous research, input from TCAM practitioners, and content analysis of online media, we developed a comprehensive instrument to measu...
Book
Full-text available
Paralele između pristrasnosti u autobiografskim i kolektivnim sećanjima. Positivity biases in autobiographical and collective memories.
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: The World Health Organization recognizes non-adherence to treatment recommendations as a growing global problem. Questionnaires typically focus on only one non-adhering behavior, e.g., medication-taking, and target people with specific health conditions. In this preregistered study, we aimed to (1) develop a novel instrument suitable to...
Preprint
Background: The World Health Organization recognizes non-adherence to treatment recommendations as a growing global problem. Questionnaires typically focus on only one non-adhering behavior, e.g., medication-taking, and target people with specific health conditions. In this preregistered study, we aimed to (1) develop a novel instrument suitable to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The aim of the study is to provide a particular portrayal of emergency remote education (ERE) in Serbia from the perspective of its most disadvantaged partakers. The study applied a single-case study design. The participant was an 11-year-old Roma boy, attending the 5th grade of elementary school in Belgrade. Since October 2019, a group of universi...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: This content analysis study explored how online news media communicates and frames vaccination rates and herd immunity (the effect where enough people are immune, the virus is contained). Methods: We analyzed 160 vaccination-related news stories by nine highest-trafficked news websites in Serbia, published July-December 2017, around t...
Article
Full-text available
Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inves...
Preprint
Group membership is known to influence empathy – people empathise less, fail to empathise, or even take pleasure in outgroup suffering. One promising way to encourage empathy for outgroups involves portraying intergroup empathy as normative. However, people are often unaware of operative empathic norms, and must consequently rely on their subjectiv...
Preprint
Objective: We aimed to describe how Serbian online media cover the topic of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TM/CAM). Methods: We conducted a content analysis of 182 articles from six news and six magazine websites, published July–December 2021. Results: Biologically based treatments, predominantly herbal products framed as Ser...
Article
Full-text available
The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...
Article
Anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and home confinement has been associated with adverse health behaviors, such as unhealthy eating, smoking, and drinking. However, most studies have been limited by regional sampling, which precludes the examination of behavioral consequences associated with the pandemic at a global level. Further, few s...
Article
Full-text available
Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...
Article
Full-text available
Resorting to complementary/alternative medical (CAM) therapies can lead to bad health outcomes or interfere with officially recommended therapies. CAM use is, nevertheless, widespread and growing. This could be partially due to the perception of the CAM industry as powerless and non-profit oriented, in contrast to the pharmaceutical industry (“Big...
Article
Full-text available
The present paper examines longitudinally how subjective perceptions about COVID-19, one’s community, and the government predict adherence to public health measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Using an international survey ( N = 3040), we test how infection risk perception, trust in the governmental response and communications about COVID-19...
Article
Full-text available
People differ in their general tendency to endorse conspiracy theories (that is, conspiracy mentality). Previous research yielded inconsistent findings on the relationship between conspiracy mentality and political orientation, showing a greater conspiracy mentality either among the political right (a linear relation) or amongst both the left and r...
Article
Full-text available
Before vaccines for COVID-19 became available, a set of infection prevention behaviors constituted the primary means to mitigate the virus spread. Our study aimed to identify important predictors of this set of behaviors. Whereas social and health psychological theories suggest a limited set of predictors, machine learning analyses can identify cor...
Article
Full-text available
Anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and home confinement has been associated with adverse health behaviors, such as unhealthy eating, smoking, and drinking. However, most studies have been limited by regional sampling, which precludes the examination of behavioral consequences associated with the pandemic at a global level. Further, few s...
Article
Full-text available
Rationale Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories can have severe consequences; it is therefore crucial to understand this phenomenon, in its similarities with general conspiracy belief, but also in how it is context-dependent. Objective The aim of this systematic review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the available research on COVID-19 c...
Article
Understanding the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine uptake is important to inform policy decisions and plan vaccination campaigns. The aims of this research were to: (1) explore the individual- and country-level determinants of intentions to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and (2) examine worldwide variation in vaccination intentions. This cross-s...
Preprint
Full-text available
Health care policies often rely on public cooperation, especially during a health crisis. However, a crisis is also a period of uncertainty and proliferation of health related advice: while some people adhere to the official recommendations, others tend to avoid them and resort to non-evidence based, pseudoscientific practices. People prone to the...
Article
Full-text available
In territorial interethnic conflicts people often claim exclusive land ownership for their ingroup. However, they can also view the ingroup and outgroup as entitled to the land. It is unknown what explains such shared ownership perceptions and how these in turn inform opinions about conflict resolution. We focused on different types of collective v...
Article
Full-text available
Tightening social norms is thought to be adaptive for dealing with collective threat yet it may have negative consequences for increasing prejudice. The present research investigated the role of desire for cultural tightness, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, in increasing negative attitudes towards immigrants. We used participant-level data from...
Preprint
Full-text available
Resorting to complementary/alternative medical (CAM) therapies can lead to bad health outcomes or interfere with officially recommended therapies. CAM use is, nevertheless, widespread and growing. This could be partially due to the perception of the CAM industry as powerless and non-profit oriented, in contrast to the pharmaceutical industry (“Big...
Article
During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative politicians and the media downplayed the risk of both contracting COVID-19 and the effectiveness of recommended health behaviors. Health behavior theories suggest perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors dete...
Preprint
The news media can influence how the public and policymakers feel about vaccination. Perhaps under the impression that such messages can be fear-inducing and thus mobilizing, the media often laments low immunization rates. This could, however, activate a powerful descriptive social norm (“many people are not getting vaccinated”) and may be especial...
Article
Full-text available
Territorial ownership claims are central to many interethnic conflicts and can constitute an obstacle to conflict resolution and reconciliation. However, people in conflict areas might also have a perception that the territory simultaneously belongs to one’s ingroup and the rival outgroup. We expected such perceptions of shared ownership to be rela...
Article
Full-text available
People tend to simultaneously accept mutually exclusive beliefs. If they are generally prone to tolerate inconsistencies, irrespective of their content, we say they are prone to doublethink. We developed a measure to capture individual differences in this tendency and demonstrated its construct and predictive validity across two studies. In Study 1...
Article
Full-text available
What role does intergroup contact play in promoting support for social change toward greater social equality? Drawing on the needs-based model of reconciliation, we theorized that when inequality between groups is perceived as illegitimate, disadvantaged group members will experience a need for empowerment and advantaged group members a need for ac...
Article
Full-text available
Even if a small portion of the population refuses vaccination due to anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or misinformation, this poses a threat to public health. We argue that addressing conspiracy theories with only corrective information is not enough. Instead, considering that they are complex narratives embedded in personal and cultural worldv...
Preprint
Full-text available
Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories can have severe consequences; it is therefore crucial to understand this phenomenon. We present a narrative synthesis of COVID-19 conspiracy belief research from 85 international articles, identified and appraised through a systematic review. We identify a number of significant antecedents of COVID-19 conspira...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this study, we further explored the validity of a novel psychological construct-Ethnic identity delegitimization (EIDL), a general tendency to question the legitimacy of ethnic groups that have been existing shorter than one's ethnic ingroup. Since it is based on historicity (i.e., the length of a group's existence), we tested its discriminative...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N = 25,435). The main predictors were (1) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (...
Article
Full-text available
Introducing a concept of perceived dual identity integration (PDII), we test whether, for biculturals to act as agateway group (GG), their identities should be viewed as blended/harmonized by the majority. We provide correlational evidence that PDII underlies the relation between perception of GG (people of Serb-Bosniak origin) as dually identified...
Article
Full-text available
In two post-conflict societies (Serbia and Cyprus), the authors investigated how people cope with in-group historical transgression when heroes and villains relevant for their collective identity are made salient in it. The authors set the events in foundational periods for Serbian (Experiment 1) and Greek Cypriot (Experiment 2) ethnic identity-tha...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Sense of shared group membership can be a powerful socio-psychological tool in mobilising large numbers of people and buffering against uncertainty during a societal crisis. We investigated if ethnic identity can prove as such a resource in preserving emotional well-being and building solidarity to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Using correlational...
Preprint
Full-text available
Amidst the flow of conspiracy theories (CTs) about the coronavirus pandemic, many logically incompatible ones arise. Upon pretesting for familiarity and logical incompatibility, we choose eight pairs of contradictory CTs. Across two studies, we observed a significant portion of respondents (40%-48%) endorsed at least one pair. In Study 1 (N = 290),...
Article
Full-text available
Conspiracy mentality is a general tendency to attribute significant events to the actions of malevolent actors, without referencing to a specific event. In two independent representative surveys of adult Serbian citizens (N1 = 1194; N2 = 1258) we validated Serbian version of the conspiracy mentality questionnaire (CMQ), a reasonably content-free to...
Article
Full-text available
In the coronavirus "infodemic", people are exposed to official recommendations but also to potentially dangerous pseudoscientific advice claimed to protect against COVID-19. We examined whether irrational beliefs predict adherence to COVID-19 guidelines as well as susceptibility to such misinformation. Irrational beliefs were indexed by belief in C...
Article
Full-text available
Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories (CT) stems from basic psychological mechanisms and is linked to other belief systems (e.g. religious beliefs). While previous research has extensively examined individual and contextual variables associated with CT beliefs, it has not yet investigated the role of culture. In the current research,...
Preprint
Full-text available
COVID-19 conspiracy theories emerged almost immediately after the beginning of the pandemic, and the number of believers does not appear to decline. Believing in these theories can negatively affect adherence to safety guidelines and vaccination intentions, potentially endangering the lives of many. Thus, one part in successfully fighting the pande...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Coronavirus is highly infectious and potentially deadly. In the absence of a cure or a vaccine, the infection prevention behaviors recommended by the World Health Organization constitute the only measure that is presently available to combat the pandemic. The unprecedented impact of this pandemic calls for swift identification of factors most i...
Preprint
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In this work, we study how social contacts and feelings of solidarity shape experiences of loneliness during the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. We draw on cross-national data, collected across four time points between mid-March until early May 2020. We situate our work within the public debate on these issues and discuss to what extent the public...
Preprint
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Although several scholars acknowledge the existence of tears of joy, there is little systematic theoretical or empirical evidence on how positive tears are experienced, what elicits them, what actions or impulses they motivate in the crier, how they differ from tears of sadness or distress and whether there are different types. We systematically in...
Preprint
Full-text available
According to health behavior theories, perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors determine motivation to follow these recommendations. Because the U.S. President Trump and U.S. conservative politicians downplayed the risk and seriousness of contracting COVID-19 and the effectiv...
Article
Full-text available
The PsyCorona collaboration is a research project to examine processes involved in the COVID-19 pandemic, such as behavior that curbs virus transmission, which may implicate social norms, cooperation, and self-regulation. The study also examines psychosocial consequences of physical distancing strategies and societal lockdown, such as frustration o...