Jonas R. Kunst

University of Oslo · Department of Psychology

Significance Individuals differ in the degree to which they endorse group-based hierarchies in which some social groups dominate others. Much research demonstrates that among individuals this preference robustly predicts ideologies and behaviors enhancing and sustaining social hierarchies (e.g., racism, sexism, and prejudice). Combining aggregate a...

Majority-group members often hold negative attitudes toward minority-group members who identify with both the majority and their minority group. Integrating perspectives from social identity theory and acculturation research with a coalitional psychology framework, we show that an underlying mechanism for such bias is the perception that dual ident...

From the 2016 US presidential election and into 2019, we demonstrate that a visceral feeling of oneness (that is, psychological fusion) with a political leader can fuel partisans’ willingness to actively participate in political violence. In studies 1 and 2, fusion with Donald Trump predicted Republicans’ willingness to violently persecute Muslims...

In many countries, individuals who have represented the majority group historically are decreasing in relative size and/or perceiving that they have diminished status and power compared to those identifying as immigrants or members of ethnic minority groups. These developments raise several salient and timely issues including: (a) how majority-grou...

When moving to a new country or living in that country as ethnic-minority-group members, individuals have to relate to different cultural spheres. Scholars and practitioners commonly agree that how people acculturate influences their psychological and sociocultural adaptation. Integration (or biculturalism), which involves engagement in both one’s...

Though people usually imagine the typical person as a man rather than a woman, the effect is mixed for racial groups and understudied among traditionally male social groups (e.g., police and criminals) and non-U.S. populations. Results from a survey (N > 5000) collected via a globally distributed laboratory network in over 40 regions demonstrated t...

Introduction In the current digital age, the proliferation of misinformation presents a formidable challenge to a democratic society. False narratives surrounding vaccination efforts pose a significant public health risk. Understanding the role of cognitive biases in susceptibility to misinformation is crucial in addressing this challenge. Confirma...

Although a large body of research has focused on the determinants of stigma, multilevel approaches that can identify both micro- and macro-level influences are rarely employed. We adopted a multilevel perspective with data from 174,325 participants from 80 countries in two waves—Wave 5 (Study 1) and Wave 6 (Study 2) of the World Values Survey. We e...

In this chapter, we examine current methodological practices in research on the cross-cultural adaptation of migrants. Based on data from a meta-analysis of 1,190 studies on first-generation migrants, we identify three main areas where intercultural research can improve: reporting practices, measurement, and research designs. As to reporting practi...

Psychological research has begun considering the dynamics involved in majority-group acculturation, which is the extent to which cultural majority groups adopt the culture of immigrants and minority groups. However, previous research has predominantly concentrated on reactions to 'immigrants' or 'minority groups' as a homogenous entity, overlooking...

Given the profound societal impact of conspiracy theories, probing the psychological factors associated with their spread is paramount. Most research lacks large-scale behavioral outcomes, leaving factors related to actual online support for conspiracy theories uncertain. We bridge this gap by combining the psychological self-reports of 2506 Twitte...

Many individuals like eating meat but condemn causing harm to animals. Dissociating meat from its animal origins is one way to avoid the cognitive dissonance this ‘meat paradox’ elicits. While the significance of meat-animal dissociation for meat consumption is well-established, a recent literature review suggested that it consists of two distinct...

Acculturation describes the cultural and psychological changes resulting from intercultural contact. Here, we use concepts from "cultural evolution" to better understand the processes of acculturation. Cultural evolution researchers view cultural change as an evolutionary process, allowing them to borrow tools and methods from biology. Cultural evo...

Research samples have historically overrepresented men, resulting in worse outcomes for women. Even when women are represented, inequity might persist due to underlying differences in how people reason about gender. Theories of androcentrism argue that, in general, people emphasize gender more about women than men. Based on this theory and building...

The attachment and caregiving domains maintain proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that has been argued to shape people’s mental models of how relationships work, resulting in secure, anxious or avoidant interpersonal styles in adulthood. Several theorists have suggested that the attachment system is closely c...

In the age of misinformation, conspiracy theories can have far-reaching consequences for individuals and society. Social and emotional experiences throughout the life course, such as loneliness, may be associated with a tendency to hold conspiracist worldviews. Here, we present results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almos...

Despite decades of acculturation research, only recently have scholars started to focus on the personal preferences held by majority members (e.g., white UK national) towards their own and other cultures within a shared society with minority members (e.g. immigrants). This special issue therefore captures recent developments and research paths that...

Recent research revealed that several psycho-cognitive processes, such as insensitivity to positive and negative feedback, cognitive rigidity, pessimistic judgment bias, and anxiety, are involved in susceptibility to fake news. All of these processes have been previously associated with depressive disorder and are sensitive to serotoninergic manipu...

Objective Political attitudes are predicted by the key ideological variables of right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), as well as some of the Big Five personality traits. Past research indicates that personality and ideological traits are correlated for genetic reasons. A question that has yet to be tested concern...

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...

Although the importance of temporal perspectives for understanding collective movements has been theoretically emphasised, they are rarely considered in research. Focusing on the mass protests against COVID‐19 policies in Germany, we investigated how protesters make use of temporal references in their protest narratives. Results from 11 multi‐site...

While it is often assumed that Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) ancestry results illuminate one’s true racial or ethnic lineage, the consequence of this inference remains largely unknown. This leaves two conflictual hypotheses largely untested: Do DNA ancestry tests increase racial tolerance or, alternatively, racial intolerance? Two multiwave experimen...

The current study examines whether the prevalence of COVID-19 cases and cultural flexibility correlate to one's use of acceptance coping across 26 cultures. We analyzed data from 7476 participants worldwide at the start of the first outbreak from March 2020 to June 2020. Results showed that cultural flexibility moderated the relationship between CO...

Recent research suggests that music can affect evaluations of other groups and cultures. However, little is known about the objective and subjective musical parameters that influence these evaluations. We aimed to fill this gap through two studies. Study 1 collected responses from 52 American participants who listened to 30 folk-song melodies from...

People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man more than as a woman, but this bias has primarily been observed in language-based tasks. Here, we investigated whether this bias is also present in the mental imagery of faces. A preregistered cross-cultural reverse-correlation study including participants from six WEIRD and non-WEIRD countri...

Research suggests that minority-group members sometimes are more susceptible to misinformation. Two complementary studies examined the influence of perceived minority status on susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy beliefs. In study 1 (n = 2140), the perception of belonging to a minority group, rather than factually belonging to it, was m...

Understanding how majority-group members adapt to cultural diversity is increasingly important in plural societies such as Australia. However, little is known about majority-group members' acculturation towards immigrants and self-identifying minority-group members in a shared society. We address this with data from two white Australian majority gr...

Research in the emerging field of majority-group acculturation has investigated the predictors that explain why some majority-group members adopt whereas others reject the cultures of minority-group members. The present research investigated an issue that has received comparably little attention. Specifically, with a sample of 2205 majority-group m...

Psychological research has only recently begun to consider the dynamics involved in the acculturation of majority groups. Recognizing heterogeneity among immigrant groups, the present work investigates the influence of perceived characteristics of these groups on majority-group members’ adoption of immigrant cultures. In three pre-registered studie...

An emerging literature has begun to explore the acculturation of majority-group members within increasingly diverse societies, recognizing that this process does not occur within a social vacuum. Given the inherent power asymmetries and ethnic hierarchies that usually favor the majority group, it becomes critical to examine their acculturation proc...

Background The contemporary media landscape is saturated with the ubiquitous presence of misinformation. One can point to several factors that amplify the spread and dissemination of false information, such as blurring the line between expert and layman's opinions, economic incentives promoting the publication of sensational information, the zero c...

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of objects mentioned in sentences. Mental representation is often measured with the sentence-picture verification task, wherein participants first read a sentence that implies the object property (i.e., shape and orientation). Partic...

Increasing religious diversity caused by immigration is often perceived as a threat to national majority members' (non)religious worldviews. However, defensive reactions to diversity are not inevitable. Building on the social identity approach and motivated identity construction theory, we argue that (non)religious worldviews that satisfy motivatio...

Understanding the psychological processes that drive violent extremism is a pressing global issue. Across six studies, we demonstrate that perceived cultural threats lead to violent extremism because they increase people's need for cognitive closure (NFC). In general population samples (from Denmark, Afghanistan, Pakistan, France, and an internatio...

In this research paper, we investigated the viability of AI-supported translations of survey materials in intercultural and cross-cultural research, comparing the quality of machine translations to traditional human translations. Focusing on the HEXACO personality inventory, we translated the original English inventory into 33 languages for which v...

Researchers have productively tested identity fusion theory, aiming to explain extreme pro-group orientations. However, the strength of effects, types of measurements, and study contexts have varied substantially. This first meta-analysis (90 studies from 55 reports, 106 effects, N = 36,880) supported four main conclusions based on the available li...

Muslims in the U.K. who maintain their religious culture are often viewed as a suspect community. This pre-registered experimental research examined the mediating role of perceived (dis)loyalty as underlying process and the moderating role of acculturation expectations. A total of 334 non-Muslim White British participants in Study 1 and 810 in Stud...

Do minority-group members welcome or reject that majority-group members adopt other cul-tures? Acculturation is commonly defined as a process of mutual accommodation. Yet, the acculturation of majority-group members has only recently received research attention. To date, we do not know the extent to which minority-group members expect majority-grou...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

Although life trajectories are frequently theorized to explain people’s attitudes toward different social groups, few studies have been able to directly assess their importance with suitable data. Addressing this gap and focusing on the development of general and domain-specific self-esteem, we report results from a population-based sample of Norwe...

Introduction The rise of social media users and the explosive growth in misinformation shared across social media platforms have become a serious threat to democratic discourse and public health. The mentioned implications have increased the demand for misinformation detection and intervention. To contribute to this challenge, we are presenting a s...

Although life trajectories are frequently theorized to explain people’s attitudes toward different social groups, few studies have been able to directly assess their importance with suitable data. Addressing this gap and focusing on the development of general and domain-specific self-esteem, we report results from a population-based sample of Norwe...

Practitioners, policymakers, and researchers alike have argued that the school environment can be both a risk and resilience factor for radicalization and extremism among youth, but little research has tested this directly. Against this background and using a cultural and community psychological approach, we developed a scale to measure resilience...

A recent meta-analytical paper (Bierwiaczonek & Kunst, 2021) sparked a controversy by demonstrating that cross-sectional associations between acculturation and adaptation are weak and heterogenous, and approach zero when assessed over time. Some responses criticized the paper by arguing that small but robust effects can make a real-life difference...

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

One of the most robust findings in political psychology is that political and prejudicial attitudes are predicted by right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and some of the Big Five personality traits. An unresolved question is whether RWA and SDO form a functional package of traits that is independent of common perso...

Previous work has often disregarded the psychological heterogeneity of violent extremists. This research aimed to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the psychological diversity of violent extremists. Based on qualitative work, we developed and validated the Extremist Archetypes Scale, identifying five distinct archetype dimensions: “adve...

Misinformation on social media poses a serious threat to democracy, sociopolitical stability, and mental health. Thus, it is crucial to investigate the nature of cognitive mechanisms and personality traits that contribute to the assessment of news items' veracity, failures in the discernment of their truthfulness, and behavioral engagement with the...

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

How do English majority members’ national culture maintenance and immigrant culture adoption (i.e., globalisation-based proximal-acculturation) predict their acculturation expectations (i.e., how they think immigrants should acculturate) and intergroup ideologies (i.e., how they think society should manage diversity)? Cross-sectional results ( N =...

Even when people hold little prejudice themselves, expectations about how members of other groups perceive them may negatively influence interracial relations. In four pre-registered experiments, each using a full intergroup design with Black and White participants, we show that people infer negative meta-attitudes from out-group members whose appe...

Due to the negative impacts of meat consumption, finding ways to reduce individual meat intake is an urgent issue. The present study tested whether daily mobile-phone text message reminders about the animal welfare, environmental, and health consequences of meat would reduce peoples' meat consumption. The study further investigated the role of a ra...

Purpose Physically less attractive job applicants are discriminated against in hiring decisions. In a US context, the authors tested whether appearance-altering photo-filters can exploit this bias, focusing on the moderating role of job type, gender and race as well the mediating role of two major dimensions of person perception (warmth and compete...

PurposePhysically less attractive job applicants are discriminated against in hiring decisions. In a US context, the authors tested whether appearance-altering photo-filters can exploit this bias, focusing on the moderating role of job type, gender and race as well the mediating role of two major dimensions of person perception (warmth and competen...

Acculturation is commonly defined as a process of “mutual accommodation”. Yet, existing research has largely focused on cultural and psychological changes among immigrants and people identifying as minority-group members rather than studying these changes among majority-group members. With the current special issue, we wish to initiate a new genera...

How do English majority members’ national culture maintenance and immigrant culture adoption (i.e., globalisation-based proximal-acculturation) predict their acculturation expectations (i.e., how they think immigrants should acculturate) and intergroup ideologies (i.e., how they think society should manage diversity)? Cross-sectional results (N = 2...

While conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are proliferating, their impact on health-related responses during the present pandemic is not yet fully understood. We meta-analyzed correlational and longitudinal evidence from 53 studies (N = 78,625) conducted in 2020 and 2021. Conspiracy beliefs were weakly associated with more reluctance toward preventi...

Identity fusion reflects a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts extreme pro-group orientations. While the theory has been tested extensively, several questions have not been conclusively answered. Here, we present the first meta-analysis of the associations between identity fusion and pro-group orientations (k = 57, N = 36,880, 10...

Unlike most academic journals, advances.in/psychology aims to publish high-quality research and to financially compensate editors as well as reviewers for their work. As incoming editor-in-chief, I explain how this publishing model works, give an overview of the journal and its mission, and present our future perspective on academic publishing.

The question of why people become terrorists has preoccupied scholars and policy makers for decades. Yet, very little is known about how lay people perceive individuals at risk of becoming terrorists. In two studies conducted in the U.K., we aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 showed that Muslims and non- Muslims perceived a potential minority-group te...

In many countries, individuals who have represented the majority group historically are decreasing in relative size and/or perceiving that they have diminished status and power compared with those self-identifying as immigrants or members of ethnic minority groups. These developments raise several salient and timely issues, including (a) how majori...

Even when people hold little prejudice themselves, expectations about how members of other groups perceive them may negatively influence interracial interactions. In four pre-registered experiments each using a full intergroup design with Black and White participants, we show that people infer negative meta-attitudes from out-group members’ whose a...

While conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are proliferating, their impact on health-related responses during the present pandemic is not yet fully understood. We meta-analyzed correlational and longitudinal evidence from 53 studies (N = 78,625) conducted in 2020 and 2021, demonstrating under what conditions COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs influence prev...

The evolved attachment system maintains proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that is argued to shape people’s mental models of how relationships work, resulting in secure, anxious or avoidant interpersonal styles. Several theorists have suggested that the attachment system is closely connected to orientations a...

It is often assumed that, in Western societies, Christian values are embedded in national identities, yet, the association between religious identities and prejudice has seldom been studied in parallel to national identity. According to both the social identity theory approach and integrated threat theory, group identification is important for perc...

Acculturation is an inherently causal phenomenon that deals with changes and processes initiated by intercultural contact. However, although more than 13,000 scientific articles to date have been published on a topic related to acculturation, only a small fraction uses data that allow for causal inferences. As a result, our field can be seen as fac...

Introduction Misinformation is a complex concept and its meaning can encompass several kinds of different phenomena. Liang Wu et el. consider a wide variety of online behavior as misinformation: 1 unintentionally spreading false information, intentionally spreading false information, disseminating urban legends, sharing fake news, unverified inform...

The question of why people become terrorists has preoccupied scholars and policy makers for decades. Yet, very little is known about how lay people perceive individuals at risk of becoming terrorists. In two studies conducted in the U.K., we aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 showed that Muslims and non-Muslims perceived a potential minority-group ter...

Increased immigration and demographic changes have not only resulted in political pushback, but also in violent attacks against immigrants. Several recent terrorist attacks committed by White supremacists invoke rhetoric around a deliberate attempt to make Whites extinct and replace them with non-Western immigrants. Yet, while it is widely acknowle...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

Cultural globalization affects most people around the world in contemporary, modern societies. The resulting intercultural contact have been examined using the theory of globalization-based acculturation. However, little is known about possible differences and similarities in processes underlying the effects of direct (e.g., through contact with im...

Acculturation is an inherently causal phenomenon that deals with changes and processes initiated by intercultural contact. However, although more than 13,000 scientific articles have been published on a topic related to acculturation to date, only a small fraction uses longitudinal or experimental methods that actually allow for a test of causation...