Tobias Rothmund

Friedrich Schiller University Jena | FSU · Department of Communication Research

Perceived injustice can trigger strong emotional reactions and motivate political protest. Although there is vast empirical evidence for this chain of reactions, we know little about individual differences in how perceived injustice can motivate people to engage in political actions. In a survey study with 1,005 German participants, we investigated...

Psychological research at the intersection of social justice and political behavior is part of the vibrant, growing field of political psychology. The present chapter addresses this research and focuses especially on justice-related thoughts, feelings, and actions of political laypersons. We highlight three lines of research that link laypersons’ e...

We define motivated science reception as a phenomenon by which recipients’ motivational states influence how scientific evidence is processed, which, in turn, allows recipients to draw conclusions that are congruent with their respective motivational state. In this article, we conceptualize motivated science reception as a psychological phenomenon...

Many people argue that support for populist radical‐right political agents is motivated by people feeling “left behind” in globalized Western democracies. Empirical research supports this notion by showing that people who feel personally or collectively deprived are more likely to hold populist beliefs and anti‐immigration attitudes. Our aim was to...

Long-term exposure to aircraft noise has been linked to various negative health impacts, with annoyance playing a key role in mediating stress-related health effects. Fairness can be seen as a fundamental aspect potentially reducing annoyance reactions. This study delves into the concept of fairness within airport management, drawing on research fr...

Prior misinformation research often lacks comparisons with the processing of true information and specifically focuses on the dangers of right-wing or conservative misinformation. By employing a signal detection framework, this research addresses the ability to discern between true and false (discrimination sensitivity) as well as the tendency to p...

Political trust has been investigated as (a) a stable disposition, and (b) a dynamic variable responsive to external events. As these perspectives lack a theoretical and methodological integration, we draw from personality research and adopt the traits-as-density-distribution-of-states (Fleeson, W. [2001]. Toward a structure- and process-integrated...

There has been substantial scholarly effort to (a) investigate the psychological underpinnings of why individuals believe in misinformation, and (b) develop interventions that hamper their acceptance and spread. However, there is a lack of systematic integration of these two research lines. We conducted a systematic scoping review of empirically te...

Die langfristige Exposition mit Fluglärm verursacht eine Vielzahl negativer Gesundheitsfolgen, wobei Belästigung eine zentrale Rolle spielt und als Mediator zwischen anhaltender Lärmbelastung und Gesundheitsrisiken gesehen werden kann. Nicht-akustische Faktoren beeinflussen das Erleben von Belästigung erheblich. Wahrgenommene Fairness wird hierbei...

The Russian war against Ukraine is accompanied by a comprehensive global disinformation campaign that challenges the legitimacy of international support for Ukraine and questions Russia's responsibility for initiating the war. Inoculation has been proven a powerful tool against many forms of disinformation, however, its effectiveness can be impaire...

Aircraft noise causes a variety of negative health consequences, and annoyance is a central factor mediating stress-related health risks. Non-acoustic factors play an important role in the experience of annoyance where the aspect of fairness is assumed to be a vital component. This paper describes the development of the Aircraft Noise-related Fairn...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

There has been a substantial scholarly effort to (a) investigate the psychological underpinnings of disinformation susceptibility, and (b) develop interventions that hamper their credibility and spread. However, a systematic review of intervention research is still lacking. We conducted a systematic scoping review of psychological interventions to...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...

We investigated pandemic denial in the general public in Germany after the first wave of COVID-19 in May 2020. Using latent class analysis, we compared patterns of disagreement with claims about (a) the origin, spread, or infectiousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and (b) the personal risk from COVID-19 between scientific laypersons (N = 1,575) and sci...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

Objective. Relations between the Big Five personality dispositions and individual differences in political trust and involvement in politics have been investigated in many studies. We aimed to systematically integrate these findings and further explore the correlations at different hierarchical levels of the Big Five and political trust and involve...

It is the task of political psychology to examine political behaviour from a psychological or socio-psychological perspective. Its topics include the analysis of political elites, especially their personalities, motives and actions, political leadership, foreign policy decision-making processes, international and ethnic conflicts and their pacifica...

The rise of digital media has increased the opportunities for individuals to self-select political content online. This development has stimulated empirical research on how people select political information, especially when political beliefs are at stake. In the present paper, we tested a series of theory-derived assumptions about antecedents and...

Annoyance due to aircraft noise is known to be highly impacted by non-acoustical factors such as attitudes, expectations and (mis-)trust towards the airport management. As exposure to noise is generally distributed unevenly, perceived fairness in the relationship between the airport and its residents is assumed to contribute to annoyance judgments....

Aircraft noise exposure is a health risk and there is evidence that noise annoyance partly mediates the association between noise exposure and stress-related health risks. Thus, approaches to reduce annoyance may be beneficial for health. Annoyance is influenced by manifold non-acoustic factors and perceiving a fair and trustful relationship betwee...

Individual differences in political trust and involvement in politics have been linked to Big Five personality dispositions. However, inconsistent correlational patterns have been reported. As a systematic review is still missing, the present paper provides an overview of the current state of the empirical literature. A systematic review of 43 publ...

Interindividual differences in how people think and feel about politics have been investigated for decades. However, the great number of attitudinal concepts that has been developed to describe these differences is likely to distract from their conceptual overlap and dimensional structure. In addition, not much is known about the cross‐cultural inv...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Zwangspatient/inn/en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...

We investigated laypersons’ agreement with technical claims about the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and with claims about the risk from COVID-19 in the general public in Germany (N = 1,575) and compared these with the evaluations of scientific experts (N = 128). Using Latent Class Analysis, we distinguished four segments in the general public. Two...

We investigated laypersons’ agreement with technical claims about the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and with claims about the risk from COVID-19 in the general public in Germany (N = 1,575) and compared these with the evaluations of scientific experts (N = 128). Using Latent Class Analysis, we distinguished four segments in the general public. Two...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Zwangspatient/inn/en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale...

Caprara et al. (European Journal of Social Psychology 39:1002–1020, 2009) criticized existing measures of internal political efficacy for not taking into account psychological theories of self-efficacy and for the resulting low construct validity. As an alternative, they presented a ten-item measure called Perceived Political Self-Efficacy (P-PSE)...

Background: Clinical observations suggest that many patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suffer from severe feelings of guilt. These observations, which are consistent with psychoanalytic assumptions (overly strict super-ego), have rarely been subjected to systematic empirical investigation. Even cognitive approaches broach the issue o...

Hintergrund: Zwangspatient(inn)en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale Seite des Zwangs...

By bringing together a sophisticated conceptualization of political trustworthiness (integrated model of trust) with theorizing from information processing (trait inferences, inclusion-exclusion model), our research aimed at investigating the impact of a politician’s unlawful behavior on political trust. In four experimental studies, we investigate...

Our chapter introduces theory-based measures for the assessment of trust in specific politicians and politicians in general. In Study 1 (N = 317), the dimensionality, reliability, and relatedness to other concepts of trustworthiness of specific German politicians and politicians in general are investigated. In Study 2 (N = 248), the prediction of o...

Misst erhöhte Schuldwahrnehmung von Patienten mit einer Zwangserkrankung in vorgegebenen charakteristischen Situationen

The same computer games are played by youths all over the world, and worldwide games become matters of concern in relation to children: worries rise about addiction, violence, education, time, and economy. Yet, these concerns vary depending upon where they are situated: in families, legal contexts, industry or science. They also play out differentl...

The same computer games are played by youths all over the world, and worldwide games become matters of concern in relation to children: worries rise about addiction, violence, education, time, and economy. Yet, these concerns vary depending upon where they are situated: in families, legal contexts, industry or science. They also play out differentl...

In three convenience samples (combined N = 3,755) and one nationally representative survey (N = 1,500), we investigated whether and how right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) were associated with support for Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In all samples, facets of RWA and SDO predicted sup...

It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant socia...

It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant socia...

The U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 was interpreted by many as a repudiation of the social and economic status quo. Others suggested that support for Trump reflected opposition to social change, as exemplified by the nostalgic slogan “Make America Great Again.” We consider the possibility that many American voters were indeed fru...

We investigated how victim sensitivity and news media exposure conjointly contribute to the formation of political attitudes in the context of the euro crisis. Study 1 (N = 208) showed that observer-sensitive individuals were more likely and victim-sensitive individuals were less likely to support solidarity with countries in need of financial supp...

Laypersons’ engagement with science has grown over the last decade, especially in Internet environments. While this development has many benefits, scientists also face the challenge of devaluation and public criticism by laypersons. Embedding this phenomenon in social-psychological theories and research on value-behavior correspondence, we investig...

Humans show a rare tendency to punish norm-violators who have not harmed them directly—a behavior known as third-party punishment. Research has found that third-party punishment is subject to intergroup bias, whereby people punish members of the out-group more severely than the in-group. While the prevalence of this behavior is well-documented, the...

The popularity of digital games among adolescents has raised public and scientific concern about players drifting into excessive or pathological gaming patterns. Among the neglected issues in this area of research is the question of whether excessive gaming rather reflects a transient phenomenon during adolescence or a temporally stable pathologica...

We applied the traits as density distributions of states approach to generalized expectations of trustworthiness, namely, social trust and trust in politicians. Using an experience sampling study (N = 47), we assessed state social trust and trust in politicians four times a day for 2 weeks. Within-person variability was found to be low but meaningf...

Public debates about socio-scientific issues (e.g., climate change or violent video games) are often accompanied by attacks on the reputation of the involved scientists. Drawing on the social identity approach, we report a minimal group experiment investigating the conditions under which scientists are perceived as non-prototypical, non-reputable,...

In the present study, we investigate long-term relations between experiences of aggression at school and the development of justice sensitivity as a personality disposition in adolescents. We assessed justice sensitivity (from the victim, observer, and perpetrator perspective), bullying, and victimization among 565 German 12- to 18-year-olds in a o...

Vor dem Hintergrund der stetig zunehmenden Fallzahlen von kriminellen Handlungen im Internet wird der Selbstschutz von Usern immer wichtiger. Gerade Jugendliche gelten als gefährdet, da sie sich häufig besonders sorgenfrei im Netz bewegen. In diesem Artikel werden die Ergebnisse einer Befragung präsentiert, die den Einfluss von fünf unterschiedlich...

Vertrauen ist Forschungsgegenstand vieler wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen. Da die Forschungsfragen und Anwendungskontexte jedoch stark variieren, stellt sich die Frage, wie man Vertrauen konzeptuell so fassen kann, dass es ein gemeinsames Verständnis der verschiedenen Disziplinen ermöglicht und dabei gleichzeitig die Möglichkeit eröffnet, disziplinä...

Public discussions about the harmfulness of violent media are often held in the aftermath of violent felony. At the same time, we know little about whether and how experiencing real-life violence impacts the way laypersons perceive and evaluate debates about virtual violence. In Study 1, we provided data indicating that both real-life violence and...

Experiencing social identity threat from scientific findings can lead people to cognitively devalue the respective findings. Three studies examined whether potentially threatening scientific findings motivate group members to take action against the respective findings by publicly discrediting them on the Web. Results show that strongly (vs. weakly...

Wann immer sozialwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen durch ein hohes Maß an Alltagsrelevanz gekennzeichnet sind und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsbefunde im Konflikt mit subjektiven Überzeugungen stehen, besteht die Gefahr, dass Forschung in den Medien und von politischen Entscheidungsträgern instrumentalisiert und in der Öffentlichkeit selektiv...

This article reviews current research on informal science learning through news media. Based on a descriptive model of media-based science communication we distinguish between (a) the professional routines by which journalists select and depict scientific information in traditional media and (b) the psychological processes that account for how medi...

Two studies investigate the psychological processes underlying short- and long-term effects of video game violence on interpersonal mistrust. Study 1 demonstrates that interacting with physically aggressive virtual agents decreases players’ interpersonal trust in subsequent interactions. This effect was stronger for players who were dispositionally...

In two experimental studies, we used a moral self-evaluation implicit association task to investigate reactions to personal moral transgressions. In Study 1, negative self-evaluation was higher after participants had been blamed for being late to the experiment compared to a control condition. In Study 2, participants imagined committing either (a)...

This article explores the notion that scientific research programs and empirical findings are fundamentally devalued when they threaten a perceiver's social identity. Findings from three studies show the following: (1) identification with the group of “gamers” (i.e., people who play video games on a regular basis) influences the extent to which per...

In order to improve the understanding of media violence effects, it is crucial to extend knowledge about factors that threaten the validity of such effects in empirical research. Research artifacts can be expected when participants are (a) aware of a scientist’s hypothesis, (b) motivated to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis, and (c) capable of m...

We investigated the psychological reactions of laypeople to news reports about a political scandal. Participants were confronted with an alleged newspaper report about a fictitious politician’s holiday habits (control condition) or about the politician’s abuse of public funds (transgression condition). In the transgression condition, participants r...

Marshall and Brown (2006) proposed a Traits as Situational Sensitivities (TASS) Model, which implies a systematic person × situation interaction. We review this model and show that it suffers from several limitations. We extend and modify the model in order to obtain a symmetric pattern of levels and effects for both person and situation factors. O...

A large body of research has demonstrated that people who are habitually sensitive towards victimization tend to behave uncooperatively and immorally in socially uncertain situations. The “Sensitivity to Mean Intentions” (SeMI) model (Gollwitzer & Rothmund 2009) aims at describing social-cognitive mechanisms that underlie and explain this effect. T...