Martijn Van Zomeren

Martijn Van Zomeren
University of Groningen | RUG · Heymans Institute for Psychological Research

PhD

About

145
Publications
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10,745
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Publications

Publications (145)
Article
Considering the rise of far-right groups in Western countries, we examined whether exposure to media coverage on the far-right is associated with attitudes toward it, using surveys in 15 Western democratic countries (total N = 2,576). We hypothesized that greater media exposure to the far-right will be associated with greater perceived prevalence a...
Article
Full-text available
Although much is known about why people engage in collective action participation (e.g., politicized identity, group-based anger), little is known about the psychological consequences of such participation. For example, can participation in collective action facilitate attitude moralization (e.g., moralize their attitudes on the topic)? Based on th...
Article
Through their design, museums can craft specific experiences for their visitors, ranging from more hedonic to more eudaimonic well‐being experiences. Little is known, however, about whether potential visitors anticipate eudaimonic or hedonic well‐being experiences depending on how the museum design is described. To answer this question, we conducte...
Article
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Social movements often comprise a variety of actors employing differing levels of radicality. This study examines how collective action enables social change by studying the influence of the presence of a radical flank on public support for moderate and radical activists. We report two experimental studies investigating the reactions towards the pr...
Article
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Within structurally polarized and dynamic contexts, such as the U.S. 2020 presidential elections, the moralization of individuals’ attitudes on a specific topic (e.g., climate policy) can dangerously escalate disagreements between groups into zero-sum conflict. However, limited knowledge exists regarding the factors that influence individuals’ tend...
Article
The experience of privilege can trigger psychological conflict among advantaged group members. Nonetheless, little work has explored strategies that advantaged group members use to manage their identities as privileged actors. Building on Knowles et al.’s framework and theories of intergroup relations, we address the conceptualization and measureme...
Article
Israel’s year-long protest calling for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resignation created an opportunity to examine unique factors influencing sustained collective action (SCA; i.e., repeated participation in social movement action for the same cause). As little is known about how to explain such dedication, we compared a well-established set of predic...
Article
Social movements often comprise a variety of actors employing differing levels of radicality. This study examines how collective action enables social change by studying the influence of the presence of a radical flank on public support for moderate and radical activists. We report two experimental studies investigating the reactions towards the pr...
Article
Scientific abstract: We review social-psychological evidence for a theoretically integrative and dynamic model of intergroup conflict escalation within democratic societies. Viewing individuals as social regulators who protect their social embeddedness (e.g., in their group or in society), the intergroup value protection model (IVPM) integrates ke...
Article
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In polarized societal debates, it is often assumed that perceiving polarization leads individuals to take sides (e.g., "pro-life" or "pro-choice"). However, perceiving polarization can also make individuals ambivalent because they feel "caught in the social crossfire" of the debate. We conducted a survey study (N total = 863 women) on ambiva-lents'...
Article
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Social and ecological crises require people to act together, for instance, against climate change or social injustice. Psychological scholarship suggests that human agency, in terms of individuals’ self-efficacy and collective efficacy, plays a crucial role in motivating people to act for a better world. However, progress in this field and hence th...
Article
Psychology is as diverse as it is divided: For many research questions asked, different and competing theories will often exist to answer them. Despite the value of diversity, this lack of theoretical common ground has resulted in major empirical fragmentation in psychological research (e.g., a “confetti factory” of empirical trivia), but also to a...
Article
The current research examines joint collective action between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, from the perspective of the latter. We hypothesize that joint action poses a dilemma which lies in the tension between perceived instrumentality of joint action (i.e., ability to promote the disadvantaged’s goals) and perceived normalization (i.e., it...
Article
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This research aimed at explaining immigrant threat perceptions and pro‐immigrant collective action intentions through moral conviction regarding the construction of the US–Mexico border wall and general need for closure (NFC). Among independent samples of Democrats and Republicans, we found that NFC (measured in Study 1, manipulated in Study 2) was...
Article
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Within the context of polarized societal debates (e.g. abortion , racism, climate change), scholars often assume that individuals have clear-cut positions, either in favour of or against the debated issue. However, recent work suggests that such debates can also be breeding grounds for felt ambivalence. Moving beyond previous work that mainly focus...
Preprint
Despite the social relevance of how members of historically advantaged groups understand and manage their advantaged identity, this topic has received surprisingly little empirical research attention within social psychology. However, Knowles et al., (2014) recently proposed a theoretical framework for understanding how white Americans manage their...
Article
Full-text available
Around the world, protests tied to the Black Lives Matter movement are highlighting myriad forms of unjust treatment that racial and ethnic minorities face, and prompting countries to reckon with these injustices. When considering racial/ethnic minorities' motivation to engage in these collective actions (alongside allies), it is certainly spurred...
Article
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Significance The effects of recent protests for racial equality, particularly when they included violence, are currently of public and academic interest. To better understand these effects, we combine a dataset of all 2020 BlackLivesMatter protests with survey data containing measures of prejudice and support for police reform. Protests were not as...
Article
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The present study examined the moderation of individualism-collectivism on the (negative) relation between system justification and collective action in a representative sample of the European population , using data from the European Social Survey Round 9 (2018). Because collectivism (vs. individualism) emphasizes the relevance of one's group and...
Article
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Social psychological research on societal debates about potential social change (e.g., abortion, racial segregation) often focuses on those who take clear positions in these debates. Yet, little is known about the often invisible yet potentially influential group that experiences ambivalence in societal debates. Extending and integrating ambivalenc...
Article
Which emotions explain why people engage in political action (e.g., voting, protesting)? To answer this question, theory and research in psychology and political science predominantly focused on distinct negative emotions such as anger. The current article conceptually explores the motivational potential of distinct positive emotions by developing...
Article
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In three studies conducted in the United States, we examined whether a perceived moral violation motivates willingness to engage in normative and more radical collective action. Based on value-protection and identity-formation models, we explored whether increased endorsement of moral convictions and relevant opinion-based group identification coul...
Article
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Polarization about societal issues involves attitudinal conflict, but we know little about how such conflict transforms into moral conflict. Integrating insights on polarization and psychological value protection, we propose a model that predicts when and how attitude moralization (i.e., when attitudes become grounded in core values) may be trigger...
Article
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Do cultural norms that allow individuals to choose their social relationships put them at risk for, or protect them from, loneliness? After all, more freedom to choose whom to relate to may promote that individuals can choose higher-quality relationships (which protects from loneliness), but it may also imply a higher risk of social isolation (whic...
Article
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Sociopsychological theorizing and research on collective action (e.g., social protests) has mushroomed over the last decade, studying a wide variety of groups, contexts, and cultures. Through a quantitative research synthesis of four motivations for collective action (1,235 effects from 403 samples; total N = 123,707), we summarize and synthesize t...
Article
It has been shown that disadvantaged groups who endorse system-justifying beliefs tend to internalize their state of inferiority by expressing ingroup derogation and opposing collective action for change. In the present research, we recruited women - as disadvantaged group - from different countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy) an...
Article
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Valid theorizing and quantitative comparisons of loneliness across cultures require cross‐culturally similar meanings of loneliness. However, we know little about whether this is the case: Influential conceptualizations of loneliness mostly come from North America or Europe, where individuals tend to have relatively few stable social relationships...
Article
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Loneliness is a common experience with major negative consequences for well-being. Although much research has examined protective and risk factors for loneliness, we know little about its cultural underpinnings. The few studies that exist seem paradoxical, suggesting that loneliness is higher in cultures where tighter and more demanding (i.e., more...
Article
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Collective action research tends to focus on motivations of the disadvantaged group, rather than on which tactics are effective at driving the advantaged group to make concessions to the disadvantaged. We focused on the potential of nonnormative nonviolent action as a tactic to generate support for concessions among advantaged group members who are...
Article
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Although political action often requires activists to express who they are and what they stand for, little is known about the motivators of such identity expression. This research investigates how group identity content and identification with this content predict identity-expressive collective action in the U.S. 2016 presidential elections. We rec...
Article
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Loneliness is a major health risk with particular relevance for migrants, who are faced with the challenge of establishing social networks to avoid social isolation after migration. We suggest that forming new relationships may be hampered or facilitated by characteristics of migrants’ heritage culture (i.e., the culture that migrants were socializ...
Article
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While we have a rich understanding of the motivations of disadvantaged group members to act collectively with their group, especially the important role played by identification, we know less about the disadvantaged’s motivations to engage in joint action with the advantaged. This research examines the role of identification in predicting joint and...
Article
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When thwarted goals increase endorsement of violence, it may not always reflect antisocial tendencies or some breakdown of self-regulation per se; such responses can also reflect an active process of self-regulation, whose purpose is to comply with the norms of one's social environment. In the present experiments (total N = 2,145), the causal link...
Article
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Little is known about how activists and non-activists perceive and evaluate each other. This is important because activists often depend on societal support to achieve their goals. We examined these perceptions and evaluations in three field experiments set in different contexts, i.e., student protests in the Netherlands 2014/2015 (Study 1, activis...
Article
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Within contexts of oppression and struggle for social change, in which hope is constantly challenged, do disadvantaged group members still want to feel hope? If so, does this desire translate into actual hope? And does motivation for hope relate to disadvantaged individuals’ collective action tendencies? We suggest that, especially when faced with...
Article
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The Polish Round Table offers a rare historical example where negotiations between representatives of opposing political sides achieved major political transformation in a peaceful way. Such an outcome should undoubtedly be labeled a success. However, in our commentary, taking the example of the Polish Round Table, we take a critical look at the in...
Poster
Full-text available
In Study 1 (N = 164), we found that dispositional need for closure was indirectly and negatively associated with collective action intentions in favor of immigrants, sequentially mediated first through binding moral foundations and then political conservatism. In Study 2 (N = 180), we found that dispositional need for closure was indirectly and neg...
Poster
Two studies examined how moral conviction and need for closure predict US natives’ willingness to engage in collective action against the construction of the US-Mexico border wall. Study 1 served as a first test of the role of moral conviction about the border wall in strengthening natives’ views on immigrants. As expected, we found that Democrats...
Presentation
Precedenti ricerche hanno dimostrato che le persone tendono a preservare l’ineguaglianza tra i gruppi nella misura in cui il sistema di cui fanno parte viene percepito essere legittimo. Il presente lavoro indaga se e come le convinzioni morali contro la disuguaglianza di genere interagiscono con la giustificazione del sistema nel predire l’identifi...
Article
Climate change may be the most fundamental collective action problem of all time. To solve it through collective action, collective motivation is required. Yet, given the complexity and scale of the collective problem, it may be difficult for individuals to experience such motivation. Intriguingly, the experience of hope may increase collective mot...
Article
Why are people (de)motivated to mobilize in favor of immigrants? Addressing this question, we investigated the role of individuals' epistemic motivation (i.e., need for closure) in influencing the process of becoming motivated to participate in collective action in favor of immigrants in Italy. Specifically, the mediational role of binding moral fo...
Article
Policymakers may be reluctant to implement pro-environmental policies that the public find unacceptable, such as policies intended to reduce car use. It is, therefore, essential to understand factors that influence acceptability of such measures. We aimed to study to what extent policy acceptability of car-reduction policies is related to personal...
Preprint
The current research examines joint collective action (e.g., between Blacks and Whites) from the perspective of disadvantaged group members, for whom such action reflects a dilemma of whether to “sleep with the enemy.” Integrating insights from research on intergroup contact, helping, and collective action, we suggest that an important part of this...
Article
We test the notion that the presence of a dual identity group, which partially shares both the ingroup and a relevant outgroup identity, can decrease intergroup prejudice. Previous research has demonstrated that such dual identity groups can act as a possible gateway between the groups that represent the respective sources of the dual identity. The...
Data
online_appendix – Supplemental material for Lonely Alone or Lonely Together? A Cultural-Psychological Examination of Individualism–Collectivism and Loneliness in Five European Countries
Data
methodology_file_blinded – Supplemental material for Lonely Alone or Lonely Together? A Cultural-Psychological Examination of Individualism–Collectivism and Loneliness in Five European Countries
Article
Full-text available
Gateway Groups are characterized by a unique social categorization which enables them to be identified with two or more groups within the context of intergroup relations. Due to their strategic situation, Gateway Groups have been found to have the potential to improve the relations between their distinct social counterparts. In this paper we attemp...
Article
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I review the interesting contributions to this special thematic section in light of what has been referred to as the four core motivations for collective action (i.e. moral conviction, and group identification, anger and efficacy beliefs). Specifically, I relate the key findings and insights from these articles — based on intriguing data from parti...
Preprint
The current research examines joint collective action (e.g., between Blacks and Whites), which poses a dilemma for disadvantaged group members on whether to "sleep with the enemy." Integrating insights from research on intergroup contact, helping, and collective action, we propose that much of the dilemma lies in the tension between two motivations...
Article
In three studies we test whether three key predictors of collective action (i.e., group identification, anger, and efficacy) also predict whether and how members of third groups are willing to undertake collective action. Little is known about this, particularly about whether and how third-group members may engage in collective action to protect th...
Article
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Since Wright and Lubensky (2009) suggested that intergroup contact and collective action seem strategically incompatible when it comes to social change, social psychologists have been inclined to see their potential match as one made in hell, rather than in heaven. Against this backdrop, I review and discuss the contributions to this special issue,...
Article
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Average levels of loneliness have been suggested to differ between collectivistic and individualistic countries. However, we know little about how individual-level collectivism (i.e., perceiving the self or one’s social environment as collectivistic) is related to loneliness. As individualism and collectivism imply different ideals about how indivi...
Article
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Hope is viewed as a positive emotion associated with the motivation to change existing conditions. As such, it is highly relevant for social change, particularly when considering the disadvantaged position of some groups. We here propose that, in the context of asymmetrical intergroup relations, hope may actually undermine motivation for change amo...
Article
Surprisingly, hope is under-researched in contemporary social-psychological explanations of collective action and social change. This may be because collective action research typically focuses on “high-hope” contexts in which it is generally assumed that change is possible (the main appraisal of hope), and thus the main question is whether “we” ca...
Article
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Prior work has shown that the experience of group-based emotions can motivate disadvantaged group members to engage in collective action. In the current research, we tested whether such action can also be driven by the motivation to induce certain emotions among the outgroup, to the extent that disadvantaged group members believe this would help th...
Article
Collective action refers to any action that individuals undertake as group members to pursue group goals such as social change. In this chapter, we further extend the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) by including not just (politicised) identity but also moral motivations into its core, effectively integrating who “we” are with wha...
Article
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This special issue contains an exciting and intriguing mixture of various conflicts and contexts about social transformation and violence. Although such diversity is important and intellectually stimulating, it can also be frustrating because a “bigger picture” does not seem within easy reach. I analyze why this may be the case, why this may be a p...
Article
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We surveyed 351 inhabitants of a part of the Netherlands that suffers from gas-extraction-induced (and thus “human-caused”) earthquakes. Based on geological reports, we distinguished between three differently affected subregions. We first tested whether being more strongly, objectively affected also implies a stronger subjective disadvantage. Secon...
Chapter
The social psychology of collective mobilization and social protest reflects a long-standing interest within this discipline in the larger question of how social change comes about through the exercise of collective agency. Yet, within this very same discipline, different approaches have suggested different motivations for why people protest, inclu...
Article
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The modern era of globalization has been accompanied by a massive growth in interconnections between groups, and has led to the sharing of multiple identities by individuals and groups. Following these developments, research has focused on the issue of multiple identities, and has shed important light on how individuals who hold these complex forms...
Article
After 2 decades of extensive empirical studies on affective intergroup processes, it is now clear that emotional processes play a critical role in the dynamics of intergroup conflict. However, it seems that much of the research in this domain views intergroup relations in a dichotomous manner of pure in-groups and out-groups despite the development...
Article
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In this introduction to the special issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations on “Culture and Collective Action” we emphasize the importance of the special issue topic for the development of the field. Specifically, we highlight the globalization of collective action and the internationalization of the social-psychological study of collective...
Article
Collective action is typically studied in social protest contexts and predicted by different motivations (i.e., ingroup identification and efficacy beliefs, and outgroup‐directed anger). Assuming that voting to some extent reflects a form of collective action, we tested whether these three different motivations predicted voting in Dutch, Israeli, a...
Article
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Although research has revealed that more progressive LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) rights are positively associated with more favorable attitudes toward sexual minorities, little is known about why LGB rights co-occur with positive attitudes. The present contribution fills this gap by testing whether the prevalence of intergroup contact with LGB...
Article
Increasing outgroup empathy is an important first step toward reducing intergroup conflict. The communication of group-based anger has been found to increase outgroup empathy due to its presumed relational function (as it signals to the outgroup that they unfairly treat the ingroup, but also that the ingroup wants to maintain a positive intergroup...
Article
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It is well known that politicized identities are especially good predictors of collective action, but very little is known about what these identities are. We propose that moral identity content plays a central role in politicized identities. We examined this among (un)politicized Americans in the 2012 US Presidential Elections. In a longitudinal c...
Article
Research on dual identity focuses mainly on how dual identifiers feel and behave, and on the reactions they elicit from others. In this article we test an unexplored aspect of dual identity: the dual identity group's potential to act as a possible gateway between the groups that represent the respective sources of the dual identity (e.g., Israeli A...
Article
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The mobilizing potential of the internet has been widely recognized but also sharply criticized. We propose and test in two studies that the social affirmation use of social media motivates individuals for collective action to achieve social change. In Study 1, we surveyed participants of a university occupation and found that enduring participatio...
Article
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Primary and meta-analytic research strongly suggests that group identification motivates disadvantaged group members for social protest to achieve social change. However, most studies on social protest are conducted in contexts that are already conducive to this positive relationship (i.e., conditions of hope and scope for social change). Two studi...
Article
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Scholars interested in emotion regulation have documented the different goals and strategies individuals have for regulating their emotions. However, little attention has been paid to the regulation of group-based emotions, which are based on individuals' self-categorization as a group member and occur in response to situations perceived as relevan...
Book
What is it that moves and motivates us in our lives? Martijn van Zomeren proposes social relationships are at the essence of this key question and, in a fascinating investigation into human motivation, he develops a novel and integrative psychological theory termed 'selvations theory'. The theory suggests that we are essentially relational beings t...
Article
The political psychology of political action provides the potential for building bridges between scholars from different fields. The main aim of this article is to set some baby steps toward building two conceptual bridges by bringing together a core motivation approach to political action with core features of the social structure that embeds thos...
Article
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Although values motivate participation in collective action, little is known about whether their communication by a social movement motivates identification with it. In the context of student protests against budget cuts, we tested whether and how fitting a value (right to free education) to two relevant group identities (i.e., student vs. national...
Article
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It can be hard for individuals to manage multiple group identities within their self-concept (e.g., being a Christian and a woman). We examine how the inter-identity fit between potentially conflicting identities can become more harmonious through a self-defining group philosophy for life. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that holistic group id...
Data
The theoretical and methodological distinction between self-definingness and identification. This appendix outlines the theoretical distinction between identification and self-definingness, discusses Pilot bivariate correlations between identification and self-definingness and reports a factor analysis of identification and self-definingness. (DOCX...
Data
Holisticness, Self-definingness and inter-identity fit items. (DOCX)
Data
Hypothesis notes. A more detailed discussion about expectations concerning groups low in holisticness. (DOCX)
Data
Sample composition. Discussing the inclusion of non-religious individuals in the sample. (DOCX)
Data
Factor analysis of holisticness and self-definingness. (DOCX)
Data
Study 2 methodology notes. Discussing the inclusion of the self in the RT task. (DOCX)
Data
Semantic Networks Analysis: Methodological Notes. Appendix including additional notes on Study 3 method and results. Method notes discuss the use of a median split in network construction, the window size used to code ties (relations) between nodes (identity concepts), and notes on data cleaning and coding. Results notes discuss the Figures, negati...
Article
Individuals often cannot address (objective) group injustices until they develop a (subjective) critical awareness of them. In three studies, we tested two potential psychological pathways toward critical awareness: Reflection (deductive, knowledge driven) and action (inductive, action driven) mindsets. Across studies, participants were exposed to...
Article
Theory and research documents but does not explain the empirically observed different motivational profiles of activists and non-activists. For this reason, little is known about how non-activists become activists. Building on a broad literature that views humans as relational beings, I propose to reconceptualize collective action as social interac...
Chapter
Intractable intergroup conflict is an extremely severe, violent and protracted form of intergroup conflict (Bar-Tal, 2013; Coleman, 2003; Kriesberg, 1993). Such conflicts include a number of unique characteristics that set them apart from other types of intergroup conflicts. One of these characteristics is the perception of irresolvability, which i...
Article
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