Thomas Kessler

• Professor
• Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Public sentiment on collateral civilian killings during wartime may crucially impact critical governmental decisions and the trajectory of the conflict itself. Across six studies in Israel and the United States, we examined (1) left-right ideological differences in acceptance of collateral civilian killings across diverse war scenarios and (2) the...

In collective punishment, a group as a whole receives negative consequences because of the actions of a few. We argue that collective punishments lead to ingroup cohesiveness and adverse intergroup relations by instigating a punishment-revenge cycle. In four experimental studies conducted in Turkey and Germany (N = 2059), we demonstrated that colle...

Witnesses of moral violations stand up for their moral principles, despite facing substantial costs for intervening. Notwithstanding its importance, little is known whether responsibility attributions and the relation between the victim and a witness (i.e., kinship) have different effects on the intention to intervene in situations of different sev...

Public sentiment on collateral civilian killings during wartime may crucially impact critical governmental decisions and the trajectory of the conflict itself. Our research is the first to systematically explore the role of political orientation in shaping citizens' acceptance of collateral civilian killings across diverse war scenarios, and the po...

Collective punishment targets people who did not commit the transgression that led to the sanctions as a response to the actions of their ingroup members. This registered report argues that such punishments lead to ingroup cohesiveness and harm intergroup relations by instigating a punishment-revenge cycle. In two pilot studies (N = 450) conducted...

Recent research suggests that citizens’ sense of being socially marginalized, or “left behind” in society, plays an important role in triggering support for right-wing populist attitudes. Although perceived misrecognition by others is thought to be a core aspect of this sense of social marginalization, the effect of (mis)recognition on citizens’ su...

Recent research suggests that citizens’ sense of being socially marginalized, or “left behind” in society, plays an important role in triggering support for right-wing populist attitudes. Although perceived misrecognition by others is thought to be a core aspect of this sense of social marginalization, the effect of (mis)recognition on citizens’ su...

In October 2019, student protests in Chile quickly expanded into a mobilization of more than three million citizens, who protested for nearly a year and successfully brought about sociopolitical change. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the social‐psychological processes behind the Chile despertó, we analyze the protests using the group‐cons...

Is post-war reconciliation determined by individuals’ personal contact experiences with former adversaries, or by the amount of intergroup contact within the region in which they live? Using multilevel analyses among representative samples of youth from ethnic majorities and minorities in five post-war countries, we demonstrate that context-level i...

Right-wing populism which had been considered fringe just a few years ago became gradually more mainstream. Given the epidemic impact of divisive populist rhetoric on hostile behavior and its strong association with anti-immigration, it is important to ask whether people endorsing populism also justify attacks against asylum seekers. Using the Germ...

What positive effects do victims gain by punishing their offenders? Previous research suggests that punishment increases victims' justice‐related satisfaction only when the offender indicates that they changed their moral attitude and behaviour. However, offender change may increase justice‐related satisfaction independently of punishment. So far,...

Vocal emotion recognition (VER) in natural speech, often referred to as speech emotion recognition (SER), remains challenging for both humans and computers. Applied fields including clinical diagnosis and intervention, social interaction research or Human Computer Interaction (HCI) increasingly benefit from efficient VER algorithms. Several feature...

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtue...

Conflict is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of groups. First, the existence of mutually supporting, rather than antagonistic, interactants is sufficient to constitute a "social group." Second, conflict does not necessarily mark group boundaries but can also exist within an ingroup. Third, psychological representations of social g...

Groups in conflict can act against one another in various ways, such as inflicting physical injury upon out-group members, actively expelling them from the social sphere or denying them basic rights. While intergroup conflict literature is mostly dedicated to identifying the psychological determinants of such overt, or active, forms of intergroup h...

In this 28-country study (N = 6112), we assessed how subjective perceptions and objective indicators of wealth were associated with majority group members’ perceptions of realistic threat related to immigration. Subjective wealth was assessed by individuals’ perceptions of their personal wealth (current/anticipated) and of their country´s wealth, w...

Retributive theories predominantly focus on third party’s motives for punishment, which are rather affected by the offender’s malicious intentions than the actual outcome of the offense. However, victims experience an offense from a different perspective. The value/status approach argues that an offense has two facets that produce different threats...

Conservatives perceive the world as a more dangerous and threatening place than liberals, which explains conservatives’ more cautious social behaviors and their greater support for policies (e.g., anti‐immigration and harsher punitive measures) that aim to manage and reduce perceived threats and uncertainties. However, past research operationalized...

Identifying the direction of emotional influence in a dyadic dialogue is of increasing interest in the psychological sciences with applications in psychotherapy, analysis of political interactions, or interpersonal conflict behavior. Facial expressions are widely described as being automatic and thus hard to be overtly influenced. As such, they are...

There is evidence that democracies are under threat around the world while the quest for strong leaders is increasing. Although the causes of these developments are complex and multifaceted, here we focus on one factor: the extent to which citizens express materialist and post-materialist concerns. We explore whether objective higher levels of demo...

In this 28-country study (N = 6112), we assessed how subjective perceptions and objective indicators of wealth were associated with majority group members’ perceptions of realistic threat related to immigration. Subjective wealth was assessed by individuals’ perceptions of their personal wealth (current/anticipated) and of their country´s wealth, w...

Identifying the direction of emotional influence in a dyadic dialogue is of increasing interest in the psychological sciences with applications in psychotherapy, analysis of political interactions, or interpersonal conflict behavior. Facial expressions are widely described as being automatic and thus hard to overtly influence. As such, they are a p...

In response to Ruitsch et al., 2020, British Journal of Psychology, we propose that the assessment of domain‐general ideological differences requires systematic stimulus sampling. We argue that there is currently no evidence that the ‘neutral’ BeanFest assesses domain‐general ideological differences and that Ruitsch et al., 2020, British Journal of...

„Wir sind stolz auf das, was wir sind, weil WIR die Besten sind!“ So etwas hören wir von Fußballfans und TeamkollegInnen, aber auch von NationalistInnen. Diese sozialen Gruppen sind natürlich sehr unterschiedlich. Es gilt aber für alle Gruppen, dass wir uns typischerweise als positiver betrachten als „die anderen“. Das kann Konflikte zwischen Grupp...

Witnesses of moral violations stand up for their moral principles, despite facing substantial costs for intervening. Notwithstanding its importance, little is known whether responsibility attributions and the relation between the victim and a witness (i.e., kinship) have different effects on the intention to intervene in situations of different sev...

A major barrier to the resolution of intergroup conflicts is the reluctance to acknowledge transgressions committed by one’s ingroup toward the outgroup. Existing research demonstrates that individuals are generally motivated to justify ingroup conduct and avoid experiencing guilt and shame about ingroup harmdoing. The current work explores the use...

Previous research on risk-glorifying media has provided encompassing evidence for a positive connection between risk-glorifying contents and (a) risk-positive emotions, (b) risk-positive cognitions and attitudes, and (c) risk-positive behavioral inclinations. Nevertheless, little evidence shows whether risk-glorifying content increases actual risk...

An attitude formation task examined how conservatives and liberals explore information about novel stimuli and form attitudes towards them. When framed as the BeanFest game, conservatives sampled fewer beans and exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry (i.e., better learning for negative than positive beans) than liberals. This has been taken as str...

Extant political–psychological research has identified stable, context-independent differences between conservatives and liberals in a wide range of preferences and psychological processes. One consistent finding is that conservatives show higher disgust sensitivity than liberals. This finding, however, is predominantly based on assessments of disg...

Societal inequality has been found to harm the mental and physical health of its members and undermine overall social cohesion. Here, we tested the hypothesis that economic inequality is associated with a wish for a strong leader in a study involving 28 countries from five continents (Study 1, N = 6,112), a study involving an Australian community s...

Social Cognition

The present paper explores the significance of Honor in the context of group dynamics underlying human behavior across three cultures, Germany, Pakistan, and South Korea. While earlier studies on Honor have focused on the negative connotations of Honor, the effects of these still remain as critical as ever. In this paper, Honor is defined as an ass...

Previous research on risk-glorifying media has provided encompassing evidence for a positive connection between risk-glorifying contents and (a) risk-positive emotions, (b) risk-positive cognitions and attitudes, and (c) risk-positive behavioral inclinations. Nevertheless, little evidence shows whether risk-glorifying content increases actual risk...

Introduction While our society is becoming older, individualization is increasing, thereby impeding personal social networks. Mutually satisfying relationships and the experience of solidarity and connectivity become rare and difficult, particularly for older people. Therefore, psychological well-being decreases remarkably among the elderly people....

This study developed a model of team mental models’ influence on team adaptive performance at different stages. It proposed that mental models have different relationships with adaptive performance as a function of the performance stage when teams experience changes: early on (i.e., during situation assessment) more divergent mental models are need...

According to common wisdom, which is supported by extant psychological theorizing, a core feature of political conservatism (vs. liberalism) is the resistance to (vs. acceptance of) societal change. We propose that an empirical examination of the actual difference in political liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward change across different so...

Human nonverbal emotional communication in dyadic dialogs is a process of mutual influence and adaptation. Identifying the direction of influence, or cause-effect relation between participants is a challenging task, due to two main obstacles. First, distinct emotions might not be clearly visible. Second, participants cause-effect relation is transi...

Collective nostalgia for the good old days of the country thrives across the world. However, little is known about the social psychological dynamics of this collective emotion across cultures. We predicted that collective nostalgia is triggered by collective angst as it helps people to restore a sense of in-group continuity via stronger in-group be...

This study aimed to enhance understanding of team creativity by investigating the type of team mental models that team members develop during their work on a creative problem solving task. We hypothesized that teams that develop dissimilar team mental models, compared to similar and complementary team mental models, will achieve a higher informatio...

Gordon Allport (1935), einer der Gründerväter der modernen Sozialpsychologie, bezeichnete das Konstrukt der „Einstellung“ als „the most distinctive and indispensable concept in […] social psychology“. Bis heute hat dieses Konstrukt wenig von seiner frühen Attraktivität verloren. Die Erfassung von Einstellungen ist ein verbreitetes Ziel der Meinungs...

Wodurch entstehen Gruppen und durch welche Merkmale zeichnen sie sich aus? In diesem Kapitel werden Merkmale und Strukturen sozialer Gruppen eingeführt. Hier wird eine Verbindung zu vorherigen Kapiteln hergestellt, indem die Rolle von sozialen Normen sowie des geteilten Wissens bei der Formierung und Stabilisierung von Gruppen hervorgehoben wird (z...

Prozesse des Denkens und der Informationsverarbeitung erklären wie Menschen ihre Urteile bilden, wie sie Wissen aus dem Gedächtnis abrufen und wie sie dieses Wissen in einer gegebenen Situation integrieren. In diesem Kapitel wird die Unterscheidung zwischen intuitiven und kontrollierten Prozessen eingeführt. Es werden verschiedene Urteils- und Ents...

In diesem Kapitel stellen wir die zentralen Begriffe wie Vorurteile, soziale Diskriminierung und soziale Stereotype vor und führen in klassische und moderne Ansätze zu ihrer Erklärung ein. Es werden sowohl persönlichkeitsorientierte Ansätze, die Theorie des realistischen Gruppenkonflikts als auch die Theorie der sozialen Identität vorgestellt. Ein...

Menschen sind grundlegend soziale Wesen. Die Umwelt, mit der wir uns auseinanderzusetzen haben und an die wir uns anpassen, sind andere Menschen. Unser Denken, Entscheiden, Verhalten und unsere Emotionen und Motivationen beziehen sich auf Personen (uns und andere) und werden durch diese Anderen beeinflusst. Sozial geteiltes Wissen regelt Interaktio...

Ihr Selbstkonzept ermöglicht es Menschen, zu erkennen, wo sie stehen und wer sie sind. Der Austausch mit der sozialen Umwelt stellt eine der wichtigsten Quellen des Selbstkonzepts dar, welche im Kapitel vorgestellt werden. Hierbei geht es um die Selbstwahrnehmung durch Beobachtung des Selbst oder der Reaktionen Anderer, um soziale Vergleiche sowie...

Anhand von Beispielen werden gängige Methoden der Sozialpsychologie möglichst anschaulich eingeführt. Das Kapitel wird grundlegende Begriffe (Theorie, Konstrukt, Variable, Hypothese usw.) erläutern, gängige Untersuchungsstrategien (Experiment, Quasi-Experiment, Umfrageforschung, qualitative Forschung) vorstellen und Risiken für die Qualität der For...

In diesem Kapitel betrachten wir Prozesse der Interaktion zwischen Personen sowie deren Beziehungen untereinander. Wir gehen davon aus, dass Gesellung (Affiliation) und Zugehörigkeit ein menschliches Grundbedürfnis darstellen und sozialer Ausschluss von Menschen als bedrohlich erlebt wird. Wir befassen uns dann mit den Prozessen zwischenmenschliche...

Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen von Menschen sind stark davon abhängig was andere denken und tun. In diesem Kapitel stellen wir diese Prozesse sozialen Einflusses vor. Hierbei geht es zunächst um grundlegende Mechanismen der Einstellungsänderung – zumeist infolge gezielter Überzeugungs- oder anderer Beeinflussungsversuche. Anschließend diskutier...

We investigate how teams develop and transfer general problem-solving skills across two ill-structured problems. We draw on cognitive flexibility theory in the instructional literature and propose that teams will achieve a higher performance on a novel task or transfer when they receive an external task intervention (i.e., task variation) and when...

Relative deprivation (RD) is the judgment that one or one’s ingroup is worse off compared with some relevant standard coupled with feelings of dissatisfaction, anger, and resentment. RD predicts a wide range of outcomes, but it is unclear whether this relationship is moderated by national cultural differences. Therefore, in the first study, we used...

Moderne Gesellschaften haben den Anspruch Menschen auch menschenwürdig zu behandeln. Allerdings scheint diese Behandlung nicht allen Personen oder Gruppen gleichermaßen zuzukommen. Unsere Ansprüche auf Gleichheit und Respekt hängen häufig von unseren Positionen innerhalb der Gesellschaft und den sozialen Hierarchien ab. Soziale Diskriminierung vers...

Moral violations seem to elicit moral outrage because of the wrongfulness of the deed. However, recent studies have questioned the existence of moral outrage, because moral violations are confounded with the harm done to victims. Such harm elicits empathic anger rather than moral outrage (Batson et al., 2007; Batson et al., 2009). Thus, moral outra...

This commentary extends Doris's approach of agency by highlighting the importance of responsibility attributions by observers. We argue that (a) social groups determine which standards are relevant and which actors are responsible, (b) consensus about these attributions may correct individual defeaters, and (c) the attribution of moral responsibili...

Dieses Buch führt in knapper und gut lesbarer Form durch die wesentlichen Bereiche der Sozialpsychologie. Der Text soll grundlegendes Wissen einfach und verständlich zugänglich machen. Die Themenbereiche umfassen Gegenstand und Geschichte sowie Methoden der Sozialpsychologie, Selbst und Identität, die Konstruktion der sozialen Realität und deren Pr...

People remember uncooperative individuals better than cooperative ones. We hypothesize that this is particularly true when uncooperative individuals belong to one’s ingroup, as their behavior violates positive expectations. Two studies examined the effect of minimal group categorization on reputational memory of the social behavior of particular in...

Sociologists coined the term "anomie" to describe societies that are characterized by disintegration and deregulation. Extending beyond conceptualizations of anomie that conflate the measurements of anomie as 'a state of society' and as a 'state of mind', we disentangle these conceptualizations and develop an analysis and measure of this phenomenon...

Attempts at idea generation often produce outputs that are marked by restricted creativity. This lack of originality is often due to responses being tethered to recently activated knowledge and salient examples. The current research tested the hypothesis that implicitly priming creativity results in more creativity (i.e., flexibility). Experiment 1...

Drawing upon a social identity approach, three studies focus on the elicitors of intergroup admiration by investigating the relationship between admiration for an outgroup and this outgroup’s prototypicality for a superordinate category. In Study 1 (N = 314), we find empirical support for a positive association between prototypicality and admiratio...

We argue that general social psychological mechanisms (e.g., common group identity) can account for prosocial behavior and cooperative norms without the need for punishing Big Gods. Moreover, prosocial religions often do not prevent conflict within their religious groups. Hence, we doubt whether Big Gods and prosocial religions are more effective t...

Admiration is thought to have essential functions for social interaction: it inspires us to learn from excellent models, to become better people, and to praise others and create social bonds. In intergroup relations, admiration for other groups leads to greater intergroup contact, cooperation, and help. Given these implications, it is surprising th...

Instead of enhancing diversity in research groups, we suggest that in order to reduce biases in social psychological research a more basic formulation and systematic testing of theories is required. Following the important but often neglected ecological research approach would lead to systematic variation of stimuli and sometimes representative sam...

This work explores the motivational dynamics of social identity management. Following social identity theory, we hypothesized that a threat to a positive social identity elicits specific negative emotions (i.e., outgroup-directed anger) and motivates identity management. Successful identity management restores a positive social identity and decreas...

A longitudinal field survey tested the reciprocal effects of acculturation preferences and prejudice among ethnic minorities and majorities. Data were collected at two points in time from 512 members of ethnic minorities and 1143 majority members in Germany, Belgium and England. Path analyses yielded not only the lagged effects of prejudice on accu...

The social psychological literature on social change has focused on how groups overcome oppression and inequality. In this paper, we investigate an alternative strategy that groups employ for social change—the emulation of successful outgroups. We propose that lower status group members will be likely to employ a learning strategy when they perceiv...

Extremism can be characterized by extreme attitudes and extreme actions. However, in order to understand extremism one first has to develop a sense of normality and normativity. Social Psychology might contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of why and how people evaluate a person or a certain behavior as either normal or as extreme. Accor...

Research has demonstrated that leader performance and leader prototypicality are both predictors of leader endorsement. While performance and prototypicality have generally been considered to be independent, this paper suggests that performance and prototypicality are interdependent and have a bi-directional impact both on each other and on leaders...

The present research examined the effects of one's national sports team defeats in international competitions on adolescents' out-group attitudes and the moderation of these effects by in-group identification. We conducted two longitudinal studies surveying German adolescents (Soccer World Championship 2006 and European Championship 2008). Both stu...

Group members tend to perceive their ingroup relative to an outgroup as more prototypical for a common superordinate group because they project features of their ingroup onto the superordinate group. As a consequence, the ingroup is perceived as more positive than the outgroup (Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999). We extend the ingroup projection model by ex...

Climate change can increase societies’ propensity to conflict by changes in socio-structural conditions (e.g., resource scarcity, migration). We propose an additional, subtle, and general effect of climate change threat via increases in authoritarian attitudes. Three studies in Germany and the UK support this suggestion. Reminding participants of t...

We examined the interplay of social identity threat and group-based self-esteem on the motivation to use two identity management strategies, namely social competition and individual mobility. Following social identity theory, we postulated that threatened high group-based self-esteem leads to an increased motivation to use competitive identity mana...

Personal and collective threat can breed ethnocentrism and intergroup conflict. We present a model of group-based control to elucidate motivational underpinnings of these effects from a social psychological perspective. Reviewed empirical evidence illustrates the effects of personal threat on ethnocentric attitudes. Moreover, evidence reveals that...

A special Latin American acculturative context is currently developing in Chile in which native Chileans have contact with several immigrant groups, particularly newcomers from Peru. This study examines several intergroup variables including contact, national and Latino American identities, group distinctiveness, realistic threat, intergroup anxiet...

Immigration, cultural diversity and integration are among the most central challenges for modern societies. Integration is often impeded by negative emotions and prejudices held by the majority members towards immigrants in a common society. Based on the ingroup projection model (Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999), we examined the impact of perceived relati...

To explain the determinants of negative behavior toward deviants (e.g., punishment), this article examines how people evaluate others on the basis of two types of standards: minimal and maximal. Minimal standards focus on an absolute cutoff point for appropriate behavior; accordingly, the evaluation of others varies dichotomously between acceptable...

Anmerkung des Umsetzungsdienstes: Das Werk ist zitierfähig. Räumliche Fähigkeiten lassen sich unter verschiedenen Forschungsperspektiven betrachten, wobei in dem vorliegenden Buch vor allem eine eigenschaftstheoretische und eine informationsverarbeitungstheoretische Perspektive einander gegenübergestellt werden. Es erfolgt ein zusammenfassender Übe...

Migration causes permanent processes of acculturation involving migrants but also members of mainstream society. A longitudinal field study with 70 German majority members investigated how their acculturation goals causally related to their attitudes and behaviours towards migrants. We distinguished acculturation goals concerning the migrants' cult...

Our identity consists of knowledge about our individual attributes (personal identity) as well as knowledge about our shared attributes derived from our membership in certain social groups (social identity). As individuals seek to achieve a positive self-image, they aim at comparing favorably with other individuals or their in-group comparing favor...

A widely researched panacea for reducing intergroup prejudice is the contact hypothesis. However, few longitudinal studies can shed light on the direction of causal processes: from contact to prejudice reduction (contact effects) or from prejudice to contact reduction (prejudice effects). The authors conducted a longitudinal field survey in Germany...

Violations of social norms can either be evaluated in an absolute or in a gradual fashion depending on whether group goals are represented as minimal or maximal goals. Recent research has shown that absolute versus gradual deviations lead to increased levels of demanded punishment and inclination to exclude the deviant from the respective moral com...

In Politik und Medien sind Themen der sozialen Diskriminierung und Toleranz häufig vertreten. Das Interesse an diesen Themen wird insbesondere angeregt durch abstoßende Vorfälle – von Pöbeleien bis hin zu physischen Angriffen – gegenüber Personen, die ihrem Aussehen oder Auftreten nach Fremde sind. Es können aber auch Personen sein, die – wie beisp...

Authoritarianism, comprising conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression, is an important factor underlying prejudice and social discrimination and therefore is typically perceived as socially problematic. In contrast, our work examines adaptive features of authoritarianism. Evolutionary game theoretical considerations (...

As part of a mail survey about their work experiences, university faculty members reported their specific emotional reactions to group inequities in faculty pay and benefits. The results indicate that sadness, fear, and anger are distinct emotional responses to a collective disadvantage. Group-based anger mediated the relationship between collectiv...

Three studies establish intergroup inequality to investigate how it is emotionally experienced by the advantaged. Studies 1 and 2 examine psychology students' emotional experience of their unequal job situation with worse-off pedagogy students. When inequality is ingroup focused and legitimate, participants experience more pride. However, when ineq...

Research in social psychology attempts to explain problematic as well as harmonious relations between social groups. We examine the question how members of social groups perceive and react to differences between own and other groups, all included in a common superordinate group. The ingroup projection model (IPM) has been proposed as an explanation...

Wie in den meisten Gebieten der modernen Welt ist der soziale und wirtschaftliche Wandel in Europa gegenwärtig durch eine Internationalisierung aller Lebensbereiche gekennzeichnet. Daraus folgt, dass die Staaten gezwungen sind, sich mit einem ständigen und zunehmenden Migrationsfluss von Menschen mit unterschiedlichem kulturellen, religiösen oder e...

Events affecting an ingroup with which one identifies trigger group-based emotions. Thus, identification with a group seems to be a crucial determinant of group-based emotions. However, some theories (e.g., Russell, 2003) suggest bi-directional causal links between components of emotions. The current research examines whether group-based emotions m...

This 2004 book showcases research and theory about the way in which the social environment shapes, and is shaped by, emotion. The book has three sections, each of which addresses a different level of sociality: interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup. The first section refers to the links between specific individuals, the second to categories tha...