Rebekka Kesberg

• Researcher at University of Amsterdam

This paper examines anti-gender movements’ online narratives through a comparative analysis of CitizenGo and Europe for Family on X (formerly Twitter) between 2019 and 2023. Using discourse and content analysis of 2,349 tweets, the study identifies how these actors frame gender equality as threatening to traditional values and family structures. Ci...

Citizens in democracies are increasingly dissatisfied with democratic governance, distrustful of elected officials and view politicians as aloof and detached. We argue that this is, in part, due to the overrepresentation of elites in political office. We conducted four studies ( N = 2009) in the U.K. focusing on the education sector. That is, we ex...

In recent decades, populism has gained momentum in many Western countries and has increased the salience of the category “the people” in contemporary politics. This success of populist politics may evoke a backlash effect among more dominant groups in general, and the higher educated in particular, potentially triggering support for elitism. Based...

Economic threats, along with political identities and ideologies, are associated with affective polarization. However, there is still a need to learn more about the consequences of different economic threats and identities fueling polarization. We take a longitudinal perspective in testing the influence of these phenomena on affective polarization....

We investigate the structure of political belief systems across Europe to investigate what belief systems in European societies, and those who hold them, have in common. In doing so, we answer three questions: First, are political belief system structures similar across Europe? Second, which demographic groups are likely to have similar belief syst...

Theories on evolution of cooperation assume that interacting individuals can change their strategies under different expected payoffs and cultural contexts. The willingness to invest resources into partners and to cooperate may therefore vary in collectivistic Eastern Asia as opposed to more individualistic Western countries partly because of cultu...

System Justification Theory (SJT) postulates that individuals are motivated to justify the status quo, including the paradoxical prediction that those who are disadvantaged (e.g., lower social status) by the prevailing system will justify the system more than those who are advantaged by the prevailing system. We test if this assumption holds in an...

We investigate the extent that political identity, political belief content (i.e., attitude stances), and political belief system structure (i.e., relations among attitudes) differences are associated with affective polarization (i.e., viewing ingroup partisans positively and outgroup partisans negatively) in two multinational, cross-sectional stud...

In recent years, deliberative democracy has drawn attention as a potential way of fighting polarization. Allowing citizens to exchange arguments and viewpoints on political issues in group, can have strong conflict-mitigating effects: it can foster opinion changes (thereby overcoming idea-based polarization), and improve relations between diametric...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals’ just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others’ suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others’ suffering—individuals h...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals’ just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others’ suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others’ suffering—individuals h...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals' just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others' suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others' suffering-individuals h...

Human beings are probably the only creatures with a capacity to shed emotional tears. While prior work has mostly used data-driven approaches to identify situational antecedents of adult crying, we present a theory-based taxonomy. Assuming that crying is preceded by the frustration or satisfaction of psychological needs, we postulate that the most...

Threats are omnipresent in daily life and are robustly linked to important social phenomena like intergroup violence and social attitudes. While perceptions of single threats are well-studied, much less is known about the patterns of interrelations between multiple perceived threats, what we call threat networks. We conducted correlational class an...

We investigated whether individuals’ punishment behavior aims at compensating for inflicted harm (i.e., retribution) or at deterring the offender from committing the offense again (i.e., deterrence) and whether punishment motives depend on the punishment system. Participants (N = 149) assigned punishment for selfish decisions in a group resource al...

Deliberative democracy has often been heralded as a cure for political polarization. This paper aims to take stock of the research on deliberation and polarization across multiple disciplines. Based on the systematic review, this paper reports several findings. First, we argue that deliberation does not consistently reduce polarization. A large num...

According to the Schwartz value model, personal values relate to each other in a circumplex way, such that adjunctive values are compatible, while opposing values are conflicting. Thus, relations of values to other constructs should reveal a sinusoidal pattern. We examined how the complete value system relates to preferences for specific philanthro...

Essentialist lay-theories can reflect a belief in genetic, social, and metaphysical determinism. These three types of essentialist beliefs are similar as they can be linked to a set of motives and each of those beliefs is related to stereotyping and prejudice. Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that the three types of essentialist think...

Rituals are performed within specific socio-ecological niches, yet the different effects of the same ritual form across different niches (community contexts) remains unclear. Here, using longitudinal measures over a two-week period during Diwali (the Indian festival of light), we investigate the relationship between ritual time allocation and socia...

The implementation of punishment has proven a prominent solution to prevent the breakdown of cooperation in social dilemma situations. In fact, numerous studies show that punishment possibilities are effective in maintaining cooperative behavior. However, punishment is often not efficient in terms (a) of monetary benefits and in light of the fact (...

An experiment was implemented looking at the willingness of young Chinese subjects to mitigate the consequences of climate change in a country severely affected by air pollution. Differently from a German model whose subjects did not manage to reach the threshold, five out of eight of our subject groups were effective at investing for this cause. A...

Values refer to abstract beliefs which serve as guidelines in peoples’ life and affect the way people and events are evaluated. Simultaneously, unlike attitudes, values transcend specific actions, and situations. While recent research showed that values are related to the attention and interpretation of situational information in standardized labor...

In social dilemma situations, individuals benefit from uncooperative behavior while exploiting resources of the collective. One prominent solution to prevent uncooperative behavior and to increase cooperation is to establish a system of costly peer punishment, that is, the possibility for every individual involved in the dilemma to impose costly pu...

In clinical practice and in research, there is an ongoing debate on how to return incidental and secondary findings of genetic tests to patients and research participants. Previous investigations have found that most of the people most of the time are in favor of full disclosure of results. Yet, the option to reject disclosure, based on the so-call...

The present article connects two approaches to the study of human motivation and behavior: The Schwartz model of human values and Higgins’ regulatory focus theory. Considering a prominent model of human motivation - the Rubicon Model of Action Phases - reveals that although both approaches refer to goals and standards as crucial constructs, human v...