Nick Hopkins

• University of Dundee

Experimental and survey research shows that a common group membership can result in increased levels of social support. Here we complement such research with qualitative data concerning the forms and function of such support. Specifically, we explore the mutual support reported by pilgrims undertaking the Hajj. This requires participants enact a se...

The concept of microaggressions alerts us how majority group members' everyday behaviour can impact minorities negatively. Recently, some researchers have questioned the criteria for identifying microaggressions and rejected the concept's utility. We maintain that attending to minorities' everyday experiences is important and illustrate this throug...

Misrecognition describes everyday practices that deny the autonomy of minority members to define who they are and instead impose identities that may diverge from their own sense of self. Being misrecognized is particularly relevant for the historically marginalized Roma people, whose national belonging is repeatedly questioned despite centuries of...

This paper reports a quantitative investigation of the antecedents and consequences of misrecognition for group relations. Moreover, as we simultaneously take into account effects associated with perceived discrimination, we are able to show the added value of attending to the experience of misrecognition as a predictor of outcomes relevant to inte...

In crowds, to the degree one identifies with other crowd members one likely experiences a sense of common purpose, social connection and mutual support. Such is the psychological significance of these correlates of a shared identity that even others' close physical proximity can be pleasurable. However, such pleasure in others' proximity cannot be...

Political theory is interested in the misrecognition of identity because it impacts individuals' autonomy in their self‐definition and thus their ability to articulate and pursue identity‐related interests. Here, we explore minority group members' experiences of being seen in terms that do not accord with their self‐definition. Our data are qualita...

The comprehensive analysis of social identity cannot simply focus on individuals' cognitive self‐definition. Rather it should also theorize the social conditions that affect individuals' opportunities to act in terms of those self‐definitions. We argue that the social distancing interventions associated with Covid‐19 provide an opportunity to explo...

This paper takes as its focus the need for psychologists to take issues of culture seriously. In doing so, it is important that psychologists adopt a critical approach to many widely held and taken-for-granted assumptions about culture and cultural processes. In particular, there is a pressing need to explore the ways in which constructions of cult...

Ethnic minority group members’ responses to their prejudicial treatment can take several forms. One involves identity concealment (e.g., ‘passing’). In order to understand such a response, we must explore participants’ understandings of the interactional context before them, their meta‐perceptions of the identity others ascribe to them, and the var...

Mass gatherings are routinely viewed as posing risks to physical health. However, social psychological research shows mass gathering participation can also bring benefits to psychological well-being. We describe how both sets of outcomes can be understood as arising from the distinctive forms of behavior that may be found when people—even strangers...

Minorities do not always welcome apparently positive stereotypes of their group. At first sight, this may appear churlish. However, we show that minority group members' theorizing on the production and operation of apparently positive stereotypes helps explain such a negative reaction. Reporting interview data (N = 30) gathered with Hungarian Roma,...

Much research addresses the proposition that identifying with a group shapes individuals’ behaviour. Typically, such research employs experimental or survey methods, measuring or manipulating social identification and relating this to various outcome variables. Although shedding much light on the processes involved in the identity–behaviour relatio...

Focusing on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, this chapter examines collective influences on individual theorizing about collective victimization more generally, and Islamophobia specifically. The authors argue that the theorization of collective victimhood is a topic of debate within communities, involving arguments about the breadth and...

Prejudice and discrimination are not funny. Yet ‘jokes' denigrating minority groups abound and are socially consequential. We contribute to the literature on intergroup humour through considering how minority group members may themselves use humour in their encounters with majority group members. Below, we consider minority group members' experienc...

Social identity research on crowds demonstrates how cognitive self‐definition as a crowd member results in conformity to identity‐relevant norms. Less research addresses the social‐relational changes within a crowd and how these impact collective experience positively. The present study investigates these processes at a month‐long mass gathering in...

Social psychological research on activism typically focuses on individuals' social identifications. We complement such research through exploring how activists frame an issue as a social problem. Specifically, we explore anti-abortion activists' representation of abortion and the abortion debate's protagonists so as to recruit support for the anti-...

Identifying with a group can bring benefits to physical and psychological health. These benefits can be found with both small-scale and large-scale social groups. However, groups can also be associated with health risks: a distinct branch of medicine (‘Mass Gathering Medicine’) has evolved to address the health risks posed by participating in event...

This chapter considers how our understanding of intergroup helping transactions can be enhanced through attending to issues of strategy. First, we examine how ingroup members may help outgroup members as a way to manage and enhance the outgroup’s image of the ingroup. Second, we consider how similar image-related concerns may impact on the decision...

The meanings attached to the nation can be consequential for group members’ attitudes and beliefs. We examined how national identity definition can influence the extent of individuals’ homophobia with 159 Lithuanian and 176 Scottish university students who completed a questionnaire which measured their national identification, homophobia, and the e...

Mass gatherings pose distinctive challenges for medicine. One neglected aspect of this is that the behaviour of people participating in such events is different from the behaviour they exhibit in their everyday lives. This paper seeks to describe a social psychological perspective on the processes shaping people's behaviour at mass gatherings and t...

Identities can be based on our social group memberships. This requires investigation of how people self-define in social categorical terms, how these self-categorizations are produced and reproduced in everyday social practice, and how such social identifications are psychologically and behaviorally consequential. Work addressing these issues is di...

In everyday life we perceive events as having durations. Recent research suggests that the labeling of a stimulus influences the experience of its duration. Plausibly, the social meaning attributed to a stimulus impacts upon the amount of attention allocated to it, with greater attention resulting in better encoding and longer reproduction times. H...

Citizenship involves being able to speak and be heard as a member of the community. This can be a formal right (e.g., a right to vote). It can also be something experienced in everyday life. However, the criteria for being judged a fellow member of the community are multiple and accorded different weights by different people. Thus, although one may...

In this article we review the argument outlined in the opening article in this special thematic section: that the current social psychology of citizenship can be understood as the development of longstanding conceptualisations of the concept within the discipline. These conceptualisations have contributed to the current social psychological study o...

Contemporary analyses of citizenship emphasise the importance of being able to occupy public space in a manner that does not compromise one’s sense of self. Moreover, they foreground individuals’ active engagement with others (e.g., being concerned about others) and the active exercise of one’s rights. We explore such issues through considering the...

The aim of this special thematic section is to bring together recent social psychological research on the topic of citizenship with a view to discerning the emerging trends within the field and its potential contributions to the broader interdisciplinary area of citizenship studies. Eight papers spanning diverse theoretical traditions (including so...

Psychology has a poor record in addressing cultural phenomena. One response is to turn to ancient concepts from local traditions and to use these as alternative analytic categories to explain behavior. However, there are problems with such an approach. These concepts will be read from the vantage point of the present and interpreted differently so...

Mass gatherings bring large numbers of people into physical proximity. Typically, this physical proximity has been assumed to contribute to ill health (e.g., through being stressful, facilitating infection transmission, etc.). In this paper, we add a new dimension to the emerging field of mass gatherings medicine. Drawing on psychological research...

There are several psychological analyses of the processes of radicalisation resulting in terrorism. However, we know little about how those in authority (e.g., the police) conceptualise the psychological dynamics to radicalisation. Accordingly, we present a detailed account of an official UK counter-terrorism intervention, the Workshop to Raise Awa...

A key issue for political psychology concerns the processes whereby people come to invest psychologically in socially and politically significant group identities. Since Durkheim, it has been assumed that participation in group-relevant collective events increases one's investment in such group identities. However, little empirical research explici...

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these...

Identifying with a group can impact (positively) upon group members’ health. This can be explained (in part) through the social relations that a shared identity allows. We investigated the relationship between a shared identity and health in a longitudinal study of a month-long pilgrimage in north India. Questionnaire data (N = 416) showed that sel...

Identifying with a group can contribute to a sense of well-being. The mechanisms involved are diverse: social identification with a group can impact individuals' beliefs about issues such as their connections with others, the availability of social support, the meaningfulness of existence, and the continuity of their identity. Yet, there seems to b...

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Seeking help from an outgroup can be difficult, especially when the outgroup is known to stereotype the ingroup negatively and the potential recipient cares strongly about its social image. However, we ask whether even highly identified ingroup members may seek help from a judgmental outgroup if doing so allows them to disconfirm the outgroup's neg...

Environmental Psychology has typically considered noise as pollution and focused upon its negative impact. However, recent research in psychology and anthropology indicates the experience of noise as aversive depends upon the meanings with which it is attributed. Moreover, such meanings seem to be dependent on the social context. Here we extend thi...

Humans inhabit environments that are both social and physical, and in this article we investigate if and how social identity processes shape the experience and negotiation of physically demanding environmental conditions. Specifically, we consider how severe cold can be interpreted and experienced in relation to group members' social identity. Our...

People who need help can be reluctant to seek it. This can be due to social image concerns. Here, we investigate if these concerns may be prompted by a salient negative meta-stereotype: the belief that one's group is judged negatively by another group. Specifically, we researched group members' help-seeking behaviour in the context of a dependency-...

What leads to the alienation and political (dis)engagement of minority groups is a critical question for political psychologists. Recently, research has focused attention on one particular minority group – Muslims in the West – and on what promotes “anti-Western” attitudes and behavior. Typically, the research focus is on factors internal to the in...

Theories concerning the relationship between social identification and behaviour are increasingly attentive to how group members emphasise or de-emphasise identity-related attributes before particular audiences. Most research on this issue is experimental and explores the expression of identity-related attitudes as a function of participants' belie...

What leads to the alienation and political (dis)engagement of minority groups is a critical question for political psychologists. Recently, research has focused attention on one particular minority group – Muslims in the West – and on what promotes “anti-Western” attitudes and behavior. Typically, the research focus is on factors internal to the in...

The stereotype that women are dependent on men is a commonly verbalized, potentially damaging aspect of benevolent sexism. We investigated how women may use behavioral disconfirmation of the personal applicability of the stereotype to negotiate such sexism. In an experiment (N = 86), we manipulated female college students’ awareness that women may...

How does participation in a long-duration mass gathering (such as a pilgrimage event) impact well-being? There are good reasons to believe such collective events pose risks to health. There are risks associated with communicable diseases. Moreover, the physical conditions at such events (noise, crowding, harsh conditions) are often detrimental to w...

(from the chapter) The UK government's "Prevent" strategy, which aims to "prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and ensure that they are given appropriate advice and support", is underpinned by this conceptualization of the crisis we face. Under the umbrella of "Prevent" a raft of initiatives has been funded to build resilient communities,...

Abstract In this paper we report an analysis of individual and group interviews with thirty-eight Scottish Muslims concerning their encounters with authority ? especially those at airports. Our analysis shows that a key theme in interviewees? talk of their experience in this context concerns the denial and misrecognition of valued identities such a...

This paper considers how our understanding of religious identifications may be enriched through social psychological theorizing on group identity. It reviews a range of work (for example, sociological and social psychological) concerning Islam and Muslim identities and develops the case for viewing religious identities as constructed in and through...

National belonging is often defined in terms of "ethnic" ancestry and "civic" commitment (with the latter typically implying a more inclusive conception of belonging). The authors report three Scottish studies manipulating the prominence of these criteria. In Study 1 (N = 80), a Chinese-heritage target was judged more Scottish (and his criticisms o...

This study explores the context dependence of national stereotypes. Scottish subjects stereotyped their own national group in three between-subject conditions: after rating the English, after rating the Greeks, and in isolation (i.e. without explicit reference to any other category). Following the logic of self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg,...

Recent theorizing on citizenship encourages a broader consideration of the degree to which individuals are able to participate in social life without valued elements of their self-definition being compromised. This paper seeks to illustrate how social psychology can contribute to such an approach through providing an analysis of British Muslims' ac...

In this paper we explore the logic and implications of the social identity approach to group processes. The theory argues that the consequences of social identification for behaviour are not simple givens. Rather than making generalisations about the behaviour that flows from social identification, the theory makes the point that behaviour depends...

Minorities may define themselves at a superordinate (e.g., national) level and also at a subgroup (minority) level. However, others' recognition of such dual identifications cannot be guaranteed. This paper investigates how members of a minority (Muslims in the UK) constructed their superordinate and subgroup identities in such a way as to assert a...

It is suggested that previous research examining children's social categorization has relied on techniques which call upon controlled cognitive processes, that is, processes under voluntary control. As such, this research may say little about children's spontaneous categorization of social information. The present study introduces an unobtrusive me...

This paper investigates how the categorization of migrant workers shapes their reception. In an experiment with Northern Irish Protestants we manipulated the representation of Poland to make the Catholicism of Polish migrants either more, or less, salient. Furthermore, judgements of Polish migrants were obtained under conditions designed to encoura...

AbstractsThis paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project. In particular we examine how the psychological concept of ‘denial’ contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of ‘Post-...

Not long ago, we attended the launch event for a new raft of educational qualifications aimed at police officers and police staff. The core of the presentation was a necessarily dry outline of the various pathways by which different staff could acquire different levels of qualification from diplomas to degrees to doctorates. This was not stuff to q...

Identities are constructed and contested. This means they may be re-worked to support more inclusive visions of who belongs and on what basis. However, identity construction does not take place in a vacuum, and social psychological analyses of change need to address the contextual dynamics that shape the processes and outcomes of dialogue. This req...

Much psychological research employs the categories of extremism and moderation as categories of analysis (e.g. to identify the psychological bases for, and consequences of, holding certain positions). This paper argues these categorizations inevitably reflect one's values and taken-for-granted assumptions about social reality and that their use as...

Much contact research overlooks how minorities understand and experience their interactions and encounters with majorities. However, there is good reason to believe that minority group members may have different understandings of such encounters. The present article seeks to address these understandings through considering the experiences of Britis...

Three studies consider a basis for intergroup helping. Specifically, they show that group members may help others to disconfirm a stereotype of their own group as mean. Study 1 shows that Scots believe they are seen as mean by the English, resent this stereotype, are motivated to refute it, and believe out-group helping is a particularly effective...

Much research in intergroup relations concerns the potential for interventions (e.g. intergroup contact) to reduce majorities' discrimination against minorities. In this paper we focus on how minority group members construe such interventions, especially as they affect their abilities to act in terms of their collective identity to realize social c...

This paper considers how social identities may shape group members' spatial behaviour. Specifically, it reports a small-scale interview study (n = 30) conducted with young people (17 years of age) living in a Scottish town close to a national border (with England). This border has very little physical presence. However, the psychological significan...

This study explores the impact of manipulating the salience of national categories upon the willingness of highly identifying Scots to take up either short-term or long-term jobs in Scotland as compared to England. The results support the hypotheses (a) that high-identifying Scots increase preference for intra- over extranational locations when nat...

This paper investigates the arguments used in public documents to mobilise Bulgarians against the deportation of Jews in World War II. We focus on the key documents relating to the first wave of mobilisation in 1940–1941 as provided by Todorov in The Fragility of Goodness (2001). We demonstrate that these documents are based on three types of argum...

The authors draw upon the principles of the social identity tradition in order to elaborate a psychological model of mass communication. This centres on the way in which people construe their social identities and the meanings of events for these identities. They then go on to look at the ways in which these principles have been employed both to mo...

Traditional models see leadership as a form of zero-sum game in which leader agency is achieved at the expense of follower agency and vice versa. Against this view, the present article argues that leadership is a vehicle for social identity-based collective agency in which leaders and followers are partners. Drawing upon evidence from a range of hi...

This paper presents an analysis of a recent UK anti-abortion campaign in which the use of fetal imagery--especially images of fetal remains--was a prominent issue. A striking feature of the texts produced by the group behind the campaign was the emphasis given to the emotions of those viewing such imagery. Traditionally, social scientific analyses...

Political activity is often addressed in terms of rational actor theory (RAT). We review RAT's psychological assumptions and highlight the neglect of collective identity. In turn, we view the perception of 'interest' as contingent upon constructions of identity and explore how different characterizations of collective identity are organized strateg...

This paper takes as its focus the perception of community. This is analysed through reference to the literature concerning the adoption of more inclusive, superordinate social categories. Whilst most research tends to focus on the consequences of these social categories for self and other perception, we focus on their antecedents. These are typical...

On the science of the art of leadership No area of modern social thought has escaped the shadow of the holocaust. The issues that we prioritize, the questions that we ask and the perspectives that we employ all changed irrevocably as a result of the slaughter. Leadership research is a case in point. Prior to the Second World War, many thinkers were...

Recent thinking on the topic of citizenship addresses the diversity to be found in contemporary societies. In so doing, it draws attention to issues raised by the assertion of group identities. Correspondingly, developing conceptions of citizenship move beyond considerations of individuals' legal rights and obligations, and highlight the importance...

This paper suggests that self-categories provide the basis for political action, that those who wish to organize political activity do so through the ways in which they construct self-categories, and that political domination may be achieved through reifying social categories and therefore denying alternative ways of social being. Hence, the way in...

This article explores how Muslim identity is constructed in different ways by two groups of political activists in Britain. At the heart of our investigation is an interest in how these different definitions of Muslim identity are organized to promote different forms of political action. We pay particular attention to how these groups employ the sa...

This study explores the context-dependent nature of perceptions of group variability by examining how ingroup and outgroup ratings are affected by asking participants (N = 237) to rate these groups either on their own or together. In key respects, it replicates the design utilized by Haslam, Oakes, Turner, and McGarty (1995). However, several featu...

This paper reports a field study conducted in Scotland. Participants from one Scottish town stereotyped those from their own town and from another 30 miles away in England. These stereotypes were elicited in three conditions: after stereotyping the English and the Scottish; after stereotyping the Germans and the British; without any explicit refere...

The authors explored how negative intergroup comparisons affect intergroup differentiation. More specifically, they tested the prediction that the in-group's negative intergroup comparisons with a high-status group would result in more negative stereotyping of a lower status out-group. The authors elicited stereotypes of a lower status university i...

Analysts from a range of disciplines (especially sociology and social anthropology) highlight the role of the ‘other’ in the construction and definition of national identity. Recently some social psychologists have come to emphasize the inherently relational nature of identity. Drawing upon these recent investigations, the present paper reports a f...

Questions the degree to which the social cognition perspective allows one to explore and critique contemporary racism. In the 1st section the authors consider the way in which the social cognition perspective talks of "racial" categorization and the processes of racism, and note how these reproduce the key themes to be found in "new racism." In the...

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (selfcategorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethems...

This paper seeks to contribute toward an integrated approach to social movement mobilization. It does so through considering how a social psychological account of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied to the mobilization rhetoric of social movements. More specifically it argues that as people may defin...

This paper presents an analysis of an anti-abortionist's speech to a medical audience. It is shown that central to the speech is the way in which the speaker defines the context of the abortion debate and hence the categories of people involved. In particular, the speaker construes himself as a member of a common in-group with his audience, constru...

This paper argues that ‘peer group pressure’ conveys an individualistic and hence inadequate account of the group processes involved in adolescents' adoption of health-related behaviours such as smoking and drinking. We describe traditional analyses of adolescent peer processes, illustrate how these contain a series of individualistic assumptions a...

This paper presents data concerning young people's perceptions of the police taking part in a police—schools liaison programme. Eighty-one 14-year-old school pupils took part in 28 semi-structured group discussions concerning their perceptions of the ‘typicality’ of police officers working in their schools. Pupils clearly differentiated between the...