James H. Liu

• PhD
• Professor at Massey University

OBJECTIVE: Obesity is a growing problem, especially for economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities. This study reports a formative evaluation of bio-psycho-social impacts of a 12-week lifestyle change and weight loss intervention led by a community-based NGO in alliance with a primary healthcare organization in New Zealand’s largest city.METHODS:...

In Eastern Europe, collective victim beliefs have become integral elements of national ideologies, especially amid rising geopolitical polarization. In this study, we investigated how exclusive victimhood was related to geopolitical attitudes in Hungary and Serbia. The study involved Serbian ( N = 630) and Hungarian ( N = 471) adult national sample...

In Eastern Europe, collective victim beliefs have become integral elements of national ideologies, especially amid rising geopolitical polarisation. In this study, we investigated how exclusive victimhood was related to geopolitical attitudes in Hungary and Serbia. The study involved Serbian (N = 630) and Hungarian (N = 471) adult national samples...

System Justification Theory (SJT) is a thriving field of research, wherein the primary questions revolve around why individuals and groups are motivated to see the systems they depend on as just, fair, and legitimate. This article seeks to answer how accurate the postulates of SJT are when compared to competing self-interest claims of Social Identi...

System Justification Theory (SJT) is a thriving field of research, wherein the primary questions revolve around why individuals and groups are motivated to see the systems they depend on as just, fair, and legitimate. This article seeks to answer how accurate the postulates of SJT are when compared to competing self-interest claims of Social Identi...

Obesity is increasing around the world, with lower income individuals showing more obesity than wealthier ones in high income countries, where they live in more obesogenic environments. Bariatric surgery is trending as a method of inducing weight loss in high income countries; pills are popular but ineffective. As an OECD country, New Zealand has h...

Understanding how individual beliefs and societal values influence support for measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission and risk is vital to developing and implementing effective prevention policies. Surges in COVID-19 infections continue to be prevalent worldwide and strategies to address the increase in vaccine hesitancy and related conspiracy t...

With the popularity of live streaming, viewers have been found to spend an increasing number of hours on stream-watching in a continuous manner. Why users choose to watch streams for the first time has been well explored. However, continuance stream-watching phenomenon has not been investigated enough. Given the importance of accumulating loyal use...

How do lay individuals reconstruct, appropriate or resist culturally sanctioned narratives about their nation's past? The current study examined this question through an open-ended survey administered to a US sample, stratified by age and gender (N = 399). We identified three major historical narratives that were popular among Americans. Specifical...

While national parochialism is commonplace, individual differences explain more variance in it than cross-national differences. Global consciousness (GC), a multi-dimensional concept that includes identification with all humanity, cosmopolitan orientation, and global orientation, transcends national parochialism. Across six societies (N = 11,163),...

Global consciousness (GC), encompassing cosmopolitan orientation, global orientations (i.e. openness to multicultural experiences) and identification with all humanity, is a relatively stable individual difference that is strongly associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, less ingroup favouritism and prejudice, and greater pandemi...

Social representations of history (SRH) provide symbolic resources enabling a society or culture to communicate what has worked for it in the past when facing challenges today. SRH (or collective memories) enrich process-oriented psychology with content that moderates and provides mediators for culture-general theories. They are produced by nation-...

Cosmopolitan individuals identify themselves as “citizens of the world.” In the present research, we tested the idea that endorsing a cosmopolitan orientation (CO) is adaptive in the COVID-19 crisis. Cosmopolitan individuals more readily transcend national parochialism, show greater concern for all humanity, and prioritize collective interests. In...

After a brief introduction to sustainable livelihoods via the subject’s history, this chapter illustrates how a humanitarian Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) based around Sustainable Livelihoods would embrace the following: (1) living wages and fair trade; (2) livelihoods across the vast and frequently ‘illegal’ informal sector; (3) inclusi...

Ingroup favoritism can represent a challenge for establishing cooperation beyond group boundaries. In a behavioral experiment conducted across 17 societies ( N = 3,236), we tested pre-registered hypotheses forwarded by social identity and material security frameworks to account for ingroup favoritism in trust toward national ingroups. We related in...

While national parochialism is commonplace, individual differences explain more variance in it than cross-national differences. Global consciousness (GC), a multi-dimensional concept that includes identification with all humanity, global prosociality, and respect for cultural diversity, transcends national parochialism. Across cultures (N = 11163),...

After police killings such as the one of George Floyd, trust in the police in the USA has plummeted. This is problematic because lower trust can lead to a range of disadvantageous outcomes for countries such as lower compliance with the law and difficulties for the police in recruiting qualified people from diverse backgrounds. However, it is uncle...

The way personal and collective event cognition are alike, differ from, and interact with one another is drawing considerable attention from researchers across several disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and the humanities. In this reply to commentaries on our target article (Liu & Szpunar, 2023), we address calls for future studies to di...

A thematic analysis of New Zealand’s historical Speeches from the Throne (10 speeches, from 1860-1899) investigated rhetorical strategies used by Governors during colonisation, to mobilise both settler and indigenous people’s participation in the British Empire. Identity leadership (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001, https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00246),...

General Audience Summary When people reflect on their past and look ahead to their future, they tend to focus on positive events, such as getting married, the birth of a child, or settling on a career. Conversely, when people reflect on the past and future of their nation, they often recall negative events, such as war, political turmoil, terrorism...

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity—a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher‐order space. By combining individual‐level measures of trust across domains and well‐being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations wi...

Individual selves and the collectives to which people belong can be mentally represented as following intertemporal tra-jectories-progress, decline, or stasis. These studies examined the relation between intertemporal trajectories for the self and nation in American and British samples collected at the beginning and end of major COVID-19 restrictio...

The status-legitimacy hypothesis proposes that those who are most disadvantaged by unequal social systems are even more likely than members of more advantaged groups to provide ideological support for the very social system that is responsible for their disadvantages. Li, Yang, Wu, and Kou (2020) sought to expand the generalizability of this hypoth...

COVID-19 has drastically changed human behaviors and posed a threat to globalism by spurring a resurgence of nationalism. Promoting prosocial behavior within and across borders is of paramount importance for global cooperation to combat pandemics. To examine both self-report and actual prosocial behavior, we conducted the first empirical test of gl...

Collective memory can make and break political culture around the world. Representations and reinterpretations of the past intersect with actions that shape the future. A nation's political culture emerges from complex layers of institutional and individual responses to historical events. Society changes and is changed by these layers of memory ove...

Collective memory has claimed a larger place in the discipline of history as historiography (the study of the writing of history) has become more advanced. In antiquity, and at the beginning of modernity, according to Iggers et al.’s (2008) panoramic Global History of Modern Historiography, historians were not so aware of the cultural and group-bas...

COVID-19 is a respiratory illness that has infected more than 217 million and taken the lives of 4.5 million people around the world.1 It spread from a wet market in Wuhan China, starting in December 2019. It may have originated from a bat. Without doubt it is the most notorious pandemic ever to be regarded as a collective memory. Disease, even whe...

“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He had three ships and left from Spain; He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.” In the 1960s, Columbus Day was a national holiday in the United States of America (USA), commemorating the “discovery” of the Americas. Today, I put that word discovery in quotes, because in only twenty-one states do workers...

There is consensus across many branches of the social sciences and humanities that history and the collective remembering of history is a central ingredient in the making of political culture. But what is the nature of the collective that is doing the remembering, and how does a collective remember? Disputation over such questions was responsible f...

The reason he projects such an “unthinkable” future, where in the worst case, two nuclear-armed superpowers enter into a war that ends civilization, is the Thucydides Trap. According to Allison (2017), going back to the Peloponnesian War Thucydides wrote about, that brought about the end of the golden era of Greek civilization 2,500 years ago, twel...

Collective memory can make and break political culture around the world. Representations and reinterpretations of the past intersect with actions that shape the future. A nation's political culture emerges from complex layers of institutional and individual responses to historical events. Society changes and is changed by these layers of memory ove...

Collective memory can make and break political culture around the world. Representations and reinterpretations of the past intersect with actions that shape the future. A nation's political culture emerges from complex layers of institutional and individual responses to historical events. Society changes and is changed by these layers of memory ove...

This chapter aims to articulate a Dialectical Approach to Collective Remembering, arising from the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary literature that has been reviewed. Some of this research is quantitative and nomothetic, but more of it is qualitative and idiographic. Some of the research originates in a bottom-up, individual-centered approac...

The outcomes of the critical junctures of history that were WWI and WWII created a social context where decolonization became a global phenomenon. As a consequence of the world wars, empires were uprooted as a dominant form of social organization to be replaced by a world organized as states, some of them considering themselves to be one people (a...

Collective memory can make and break political culture around the world. Representations and reinterpretations of the past intersect with actions that shape the future. A nation's political culture emerges from complex layers of institutional and individual responses to historical events. Society changes and is changed by these layers of memory ove...

Collective memory can make and break political culture around the world. Representations and reinterpretations of the past intersect with actions that shape the future. A nation's political culture emerges from complex layers of institutional and individual responses to historical events. Society changes and is changed by these layers of memory ove...

While the previous chapter focused on presenting theoretical ingredients for organizing collective memory, this chapter provides a case study of what is known about the content, structure, and functions of social representations of world history (SRWH) today. This grounds theorizing about collective memory as an open system in the specific context...

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but on October 11, 1992, the quincentennial Columbus Day parade in the city of Denver, Colorado, was canceled due to fears of violence between Native American protestors and Italian American parade organizers (Hitchmough, 2013). While Columbus celebrations were not as contentious in other parts of the USA, t...

How is collective memory organized? Perhaps more than any other construct in the social sciences, collective memory is blessed with a substantial literature that articulates both its top-down structure, as organized by the state and other institutions, and its bottom-up structure, as represented in the hearts and minds of individuals who belong to...

In this article, we test if conservatism predicts psychological wellbeing longitudinally. We based the study on previous findings showing that conservatives score higher on different measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction and happiness. Most explanations in the literature have assumed that conservatism antecedes wellbeing without consider...

Since its inception as a modern and evolving discipline, psychology has been concerned with issues of human security. This think piece offers an initial conceptualisation of human security as a broad security concept that encompasses a range of interrelated dimensions that have been responded to by different sub-disciplinary domains within psycholo...

This book brings together dozens of the world’s leading scholars in memory studies to explore national memory in an age of populism. Drawing on disciplines ranging from cognitive science to history, these scholars address issues such as how memory is tied to individual and collective identity, how national pasts create political presents, and how a...

This book brings together dozens of the world’s leading scholars in memory studies to explore national memory in an age of populism. Drawing on disciplines ranging from cognitive science to history, these scholars address issues such as how memory is tied to individual and collective identity, how national pasts create political presents, and how a...

In the context of historical and ongoing tensions between different ethnic groups, inter-ethnic marriages are increasingly prevalent in Indonesia today. This article explores the social materiality of memory objects (money and related household items) in the negotiation of shared lifeworlds within two inter-ethnic marriages between Javanese and Chi...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, does more internet and social media use lead to taking more- or less-effective preventive measures against the disease? A two-wave longitudinal survey with the general population in mainland China in mid-2020 found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, internet and social media use intensity promoted the adoption of nonph...

Despite histories of considerable conflict between particular ethnic groups in Indonesia, inter-ethnic marriages are increasingly commonplace. This article explores how Javanese and Chinese couples conduct their everyday lives together and manage various inter-cultural tensions within and across various locales, and with reference to particular mat...

Inter-ethnic married couples develop their intimate lives together within the context of their broader cultural communities. Drawing from 10-weeks of fieldwork with ten Javanese and Chinese Indonesian couples (65 interviews, over 500 pages of transcript, 70 pages of field notes, and over 360 photographs), we approach such marriages as dynamic sites...

Discovery of behavioral patterns in online social commerce practice becomes important in this digital era. In this article, we propose a systematic approach to behavioral pattern discovery, and apply it in an emerging online social commerce venue: live streaming. We investigate behavioral patterns in gifting encouragement in live streaming to under...

The study of collective memory (CM) forms a platform for dialogue between top‐down (CM as publicly available symbols) and bottom‐up approaches (CM as aggregated across individuals), and between the idiographic (case specific) and nomothetic (universal) approaches across the social sciences and humanities. The availability of symbolic resources from...

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity - a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher-order space. By combining individual-level measures of trust across domains and well-being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations...

Cooperation within and across borders is of paramount importance for the provision of public goods. Parochialism – the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members – limits contributions to global public goods. National parochialism (i.e., greater cooperation among members of the same nation) could vary across nations and has been...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has given rise to unprecedented and extraordinary conditions. It represents a profound threat to health and political and economic stability globally. It is the pressing issue of the current historical moment and is likely to have far‐reaching social and political implications over the next decade. Political psychology can inf...

The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected both physical health and mental well-being around the world. Stress-related reactions, if prolonged, may result in mental health problems. We examined the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in a multinational study and explored the effects of government responses to...

This study focuses on the collective remembering of an ancient system of meaning, examining content and changes in the construction of Confucianism in Chinese textbooks. The data consists of 84 editions of Chinese language teaching textbooks published by the People’s Education Press from 1949 to 2019. Content analysis shows that Confucianism is and...

Psychology has become connected to the “memory boom” in research, that highlights the concept of social representations, defined as a shared system of knowledge and belief that facilitates communication about social objects where culture is conceptualized as a meta-system of social representations mediated by language, symbols, and their institutio...

Leading up to the 2017 New Zealand general election, Stuff.co.nz and Massey University collaborated in two online surveys of public opinion to test the mood of the nation and seek opinions about a range of relevant political and social issues. Given their success, two more surveys were conducted in 2020. This article summarises results from the 202...

We investigated differences in personality traits (Big-5) and human values amongst four groups of Brazilian students staying at home or studying abroad. Two groups came from Brazilian universities: one had no interest studying abroad (n = 112), while the other group was interested studying abroad (n = 227). The third and fourth groups were Brazilia...

Recently, researchers have endeavored to extend cultural perspectives of collective remembering by examining communicative or living historical memory (collective memories that emerge from informal communication between ordinary people). The current study examined the content and subjective evaluation of living historical memory from open-ended nom...

The present study focuses on a new type of social representation: the historical system of meaning embodied by the philosophy and lifeways of Confucianism. Eighteen young and educated Chinese were interviewed face-to-face. Thematic analyses of their transcripts showed that Confucianism representations contained two subthemes, figures (Confucius and...

Political ideology has been hypothesized to be associated with cooperation and national parochialism (i.e. greater cooperation with members of one's nation), with liberals thought to have more cooperation with strangers and less national parochialism, compared to conservatives. However, previous findings are limited to few—and predominantly western...

Growing efforts have been made to pool coronavirus data and control measures from countries and regions to compare the effectiveness of government policies. We examine whether these strategies can explain East Asia’s effective control of the COVID‐19 pandemic based on time‐series data with cross‐correlations between the Stringency Index and number...

Psychology has a pervasive but shallow engagement with Confucian philosophy, mainly referencing its popular form as a part of Chinese tradition. This special issue takes a more systematic view of Confucianism as comprehensive philosophy. Drawing from New Confucianism, it is argued that the signal contribution of Confucianism to psychology as human...

United Nations and World Health Organization data show a positive correlation, r = .53, p < .0001, N = 189, between COVID‐19 infection rates and the human development index (HDI). Less wealthy, less educated countries with lower life spans were also more successful in maintaining lower fatality rates, r = .46, p < .0001, N = 189 whereas 9 of the to...

General Audience Summary Scholars argue that countries like to produce “a suitable past” that glorifies the history of their own nation. This adds to the soft power of the state by enhancing national identity. However, not much research has tested whether greater historical knowledge is actually connected to national identity in countries around th...

Parasocial theory views ordinary people’s emotional bonding with political figures as a form of parasocial relationship (PSR). Despite the insights it offers, existing measures of PSR have been criticized conceptually and psychometrically. We developed a new scale of PSR with political figures (PSR-P) and examined the construct validity, factor rep...

In psychology, where a natural science epistemology holds sway, relationships between the researcher and the researched are usually hierarchical and transactional, bound in procedural and legal ethics. This limited view of ethics fails to account for issues of power and privilege, as well as inequalities in economic and sociocultural structures. We...

Cosmopolitan Orientation’s (COS) relationship with personal religiosity, organizational religiosity, and national identity was examined in nationally representative samples from 19 societies (13 mainly Christian, 2 Muslim, and 4 societies with historically Buddhist influences, N = 8740). Multi-group structural equation models found that personal re...

The historical writings of four major political identity entrepreneurs in pre-independence India mobilizing Indian national identity are analysed using the concept of historical trajectories (derived from a reading of Propp’s linear sequential analysis). The theory of history and identity draws from social representations theory to analyse the cont...

Living historical memory (LHM) was assessed amongst representative samples of adults from 40 societies (N=22,708), who completed online surveys asking them to name 3 historical events in living memory that have had the greatest impact on their country. Multilevel analyses revealed that the number of LHM nominations was positively but variably relat...

The new era of information technology brings new opportunities but also poses new threats. In our paper, we examine whether a shift from traditional print and broadcasting to new online media results in the increased normalization of hate speech towards minorities, and whether this change can subsequently increase prejudice towards minorities. Our...

The predictive value of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Human Values on the beliefs that (1) human activity is causing climate change, and that (2) governments of the world should act together to reduce global carbon emissions are examined in 20 countries. We also examined whether country level variables (e.g., environmental performance inde...

Live streaming is becoming popular and has attracted large numbers of online viewers. It becomes a social commerce venue where streamers can gain commercial benefits from building the relationship with viewers. Before building relationship with more viewers, how to attract more viewers is the essential foundation in the live streaming industry. Thi...

Masspersonal information seeking repertoires are a person-centered method of gaining insight into the relationship between Internet use, subjective well-being, and political participation. Through latent profile analysis, three person types were identified in two waves of stratified samples in 18 countries (N = 8352). In accord with the “augmentati...

According to Robert Putnam, trust can be a proxy for social capital. Thus, a higher societal trust could be related to economic growth. To test this hypothesis, we simulated the association between trust and economic growth in two artificial societies. One artificial society (New Zealand) exhibited higher levels of initial trust, and the other (Arg...

This chapter comments on commentaries on prospects for a more equitable Global Psychology as envisioned by Kuo-shu Yang. Yang was a quantitative empirical researcher, committed to quantitative survey methods even though he moved away from cross-cultural psychology toward indigenous psychology (IP). His instructive list of do’s and don’t provides a...

This study examines age and sex differences in human values, with GDP, GGI (Gender Gap Index), and individualism-collectivism as culture-level moderators, using representative data for age and sex across 20 countries with substantial cultural variability (N = 21,362). Cross-sectional findings revealed that all values dimensions varied in importance...

The Narrative Categorical Content Analysis toolkit (abbreviated as NarrCat) decomposes narratives into distinct, quantifiable psychological processes. In this study, NarrCat was applied to analyze New Zealand’s historical “Speeches from the Throne” from 1854 to 1913 (68 speeches). Specifically, NarrCat’s cognition, emotion, and intention modules we...

Psychology has begun contributing to social theory by providing empirical measures of actually existing cosmopolitanism that complements more purely theoretical conceptions of the construct common in philosophy and sociology. Drawing from two waves of research on representative adult samples from 19 countries (N = 8740), metric invariance was found...

This study explores the individual-and country-level factors that influence how getting news from social media relates to people's beliefs about anthropogenic climate change. Concepts of psychological distance and motivated reasoning are tested using multilevel analysis with survey data in 20 countries (N ¼ 18,785). Results suggest that using socia...

Vote shares for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have increased considerably in recent years, and this advancement of PRRPs has been attributed in part to social media. We assess the affinity between social media and populist radical right parties by examining a) whether more frequent social media use for news enhances the willingness to vote...

Immigration is a worldwide subject of interest, and studies about attitudes towards immigrants have been frequent due to immigration crises in different locations across the globe. We aimed at understanding individual-level effects of human values and ideological beliefs (Right-Wing Authoritarianism – RWA, and Social Dominance Orientation – SDO) on...

The growing importance of social media for getting science news has raised questions about whether these online platforms foster or hinder public trust in science. Employing multilevel modeling, this study leverages a 20-country survey to examine the relationship between social media news use and trust in science. Results show a positive relationsh...

This study examined how internet use is related to subjective well-being, using longitudinal data from 19 nations with representative online samples stratified for age, gender, and region (N = 7122, 51.43% women, Mage= 45.26). Life satisfaction and anxiety served as indices of subjective well-being at time 1 (t1) and then six months later (t2). Fre...

Based on social identity theory and the dual process model of social attitudes, we argue that individuals high in right-wing authoritarianism are motivated to identify with their national in-group. In addition, considering that national identities are shaped by political and historical factors, we propose that authoritarian individuals will identif...

This study examines how the use of internet is related to well-being using longitudinal data from 19 nations with representative online quota stratification samples (N = 7122, 51.43% women, Mage = 45.26). Life satisfaction and anxiety were measured as indexes of subjective well-being at time one (t1) and then sixth months later (t2). Frequency of i...

Social group membership and its social‐relational corollaries, for example, social contact, trust, and support, are prophylactic for health. Research has tended to focus on how direct social interactions between members of small‐scale groups (i.e., a local sports team or community group) are conducive to positive health outcomes. The current study...

Vote shares for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have increased considerably in recent years. Since Donald Trump’s victory at the 2016 US Presidential election, the advancement of populist radical right actors has been attributed in part to social media. This study aimed to assess the affinity between social media and populist radical right p...

Second screening politics is an emerging communication practice for engaging with public affairs content. Scholars are increasingly interested in exploring pro-democratic effects of dual screening during news events and election cycles. This paper examines the potential for second screening practices to develop social capital on social media platfo...

Since introduced by Professor McLeod and the Wisconsin School at the turn of the century, a large body of research has employed the communication mediation model. Yet, most of these studies rely on cross-sectional and individual-level survey data collected in the United States. This paper seeks to address these shortcomings by testing a specificati...

Social trust has long attracted the interest of researchers across different disciplines. Most of previous studies rely on single-country data and consider only one dimension of social trust at a time (e.g., trust in science, the media or political institutions). This research extends a framework developed by the Global Trust Inventory (GTI) by dis...

Following a survey asking many questions about world history, 6185 students from 35 countries were asked, “What contribution do you think the country you are living in has made to world history?” They provided an estimate from 0 to 100%, where 0% indicated that the country made no contribution to world history and 100% indicated that all contributi...