Wolfgang Stroebe

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of Psychology

Psychological research on the predictors of conspiracy theorizing - explaining important social and political events or circumstances as secret plots by malevolent groups - has flourished in recent years. However, research has typically examined only a small number of predictors in one, or a small number of, national contexts. Such approaches make...

There is a striking discrepancy in both U.S and the U.K data between obesity rates, which are increasing, and self-reported food consumption rates, which are decreasing. There are two possible explanations for this discrepancy, namely that the widely accepted energy balance interpretation of obesity is wrong or that food consumption data are someho...

Some public officials have expressed concern that policies mandating collective public health behaviors (e.g., national/regional "lockdown") may result in behavioral fatigue that ultimately renders such policies ineffective. Boredom, specifically, has been singled out as one potential risk factor for noncompliance. We examined whether there was emp...

Although behavioral weight loss treatment can result in health benefits, the effects on weight loss are generally disappointing, with lost weight regained within a few years. Because these problems appear to be due to a failure to execute the strong weight control intentions formed during treatment, the use of implementation intentions has been sug...

There is a great deal of empirical evidence that owning a firearm increases the risk of dying from suicide. Most suicides are impulsive. Nearly 50% of survivors of suicide attempts report that they took less than 10 minutes between the decision to die and their suicide attempt. The great majority of these suicide survivors never make another attemp...

Early theories of overweight and obesity (psychosomatic theory, externality theory, and boundary model of eating) assume that individuals with obesity overeat because their ability to recognize internal hunger and satiation cues is impaired. According to the boundary model of eating, this reduced sensitivity is a consequence of their consistent att...

It is puzzling that a sizeable percentage of people refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. This study aimed to examine social psychological factors influencing their vaccine hesitancy. This longitudinal study traced a cohort of 2663 individuals in 25 countries from the time before COVID-19 vaccines became available (March 2020) to July 2021, wh...

Xenophobia and anti-immigrant attacks rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet this may not be solely due to the disease threat. According to theories of frustration and scapegoating, situational obstructions and deprivation can motivate prejudice against outgroups. Using a global natural quasi-experimental design, this study tests whether the restri...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

Anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and home confinement has been associated with adverse health behaviors, such as unhealthy eating, smoking, and drinking. However, most studies have been limited by regional sampling, which precludes the examination of behavioral consequences associated with the pandemic at a global level. Further, few s...

The present paper examines longitudinally how subjective perceptions about COVID-19, one’s community, and the government predict adherence to public health measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Using an international survey ( N = 3040), we test how infection risk perception, trust in the governmental response and communications about COVID-19...

Before vaccines for COVID-19 became available, a set of infection prevention behaviors constituted the primary means to mitigate the virus spread. Our study aimed to identify important predictors of this set of behaviors. Whereas social and health psychological theories suggest a limited set of predictors, machine learning analyses can identify cor...

Anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and home confinement has been associated with adverse health behaviors, such as unhealthy eating, smoking, and drinking. However, most studies have been limited by regional sampling, which precludes the examination of behavioral consequences associated with the pandemic at a global level. Further, few s...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256740.].

Tightening social norms is thought to be adaptive for dealing with collective threat yet it may have negative consequences for increasing prejudice. The present research investigated the role of desire for cultural tightness, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, in increasing negative attitudes towards immigrants. We used participant-level data from...

During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative politicians and the media downplayed the risk of both contracting COVID-19 and the effectiveness of recommended health behaviors. Health behavior theories suggest perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors dete...

During the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. conservative politicians and the media downplayed the risk of both contracting COVID-19 and the effectiveness of recommended health behaviors. Health behavior theories suggest perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors dete...

According to health behavior theories, perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors determine motivation to follow these recommendations. Because the U.S. President Trump and U.S. conservative politicians downplayed the risk and seriousness of contracting COVID-19 and the effectiv...

The Coronavirus is highly infectious and potentially deadly. In the absence of a cure or a vaccine, the infection prevention behaviors recommended by the World Health Organization constitute the only measure that is presently available to combat the pandemic. The unprecedented impact of this pandemic calls for swift identification of factors most i...

In this work, we study how social contacts and feelings of solidarity shape experiences of loneliness during the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. We draw on cross-national data, collected across four time points between mid-March until early May 2020. We situate our work within the public debate on these issues and discuss to what extent the public...

According to health behavior theories, perceived vulnerability to a health threat and perceived effectiveness of recommended health-protective behaviors determine motivation to follow these recommendations. Because the U.S. President Trump and U.S. conservative politicians downplayed the risk and seriousness of contracting COVID-19 and the effectiv...

The PsyCorona collaboration is a research project to examine processes involved in the COVID-19 pandemic, such as behavior that curbs virus transmission, which may implicate social norms, cooperation, and self-regulation. The study also examines psychosocial consequences of physical distancing strategies and societal lockdown, such as frustration o...

Significance Some mass shooters openly express intent to target ethnic and racial minorities, but members of the public still do not agree on whether the gunman was indeed motivated by prejudice and/or hatred. The present research finds that members of a dominant majority often express uncertainty about hate crimes when they privately sympathize wi...

Mapping the Moods of COVID-19: Global Study Uses Data Visualization to Track Psychological Responses, Identify Targets for Intervention

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) do not measure teaching effectiveness, and their widespread use by university administrators in decisions about faculty hiring, promotions, and merit increases encourages poor teaching and causes grade inflation. Students need to get good grades, and faculty members need to get good SETs. Therefore, SETs empow...

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...

Between 2016 and 2017, Americans suffered 3 of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history by a lone gunman: the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Las Vegas strip shooting, and the Texas church shooting. We studied American gun owners in the wakes of these tragedies, theorizing that a byproduct of the salience of mass shootings is to increase the...

Several hundred research groups attempted replications of published effects in so-called Many Labs studies involving thousands of research participants. Given this enormous investment, it seems timely to assess what has been learned and what can be learned from this type of project. My evaluation addresses four questions: First, do these replicatio...

That most psychological research is conducted with students led to concerns that psychological laws only apply to this population. These fears are based on Campbell and Stanley’s (1966) concept of external validity that specifies the extent to which research findings can be generalized. This concept is based on an inductivist philosophy. As philoso...

We advocate that replications should be an integral part of the scientific discourse and provide insights about the conditions under which an effect occurs. By themselves, mere nonreplications are not informative about the “truth” of an effect. As a consequence, the mechanistic continuation of multilab replications should be replaced by diagnostic...

Doliński (2018, this issue) deplores the decline of behavior observation in social psychology since the 1960’s and asks whether (social-) psychology is still a behavioral science. I question both, that there was a decline and that direct behavior observations are essential for a science of behavior. After all, behavior can also be inferred from out...

Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - Applied Social Psychology - edited by Linda Steg

We advocate that replications should be an integral part of the scientific discourse and provide insights about the conditions under which an effect occurs. By themselves, mere nonreplica-tions are not informative about the “truth” of an effect. As a consequence, the mechanistic contin-uation of multi-lab replications should be replaced by diagnost...

A new theory of eating regulation is presented to account for the over-responsiveness of restrained eaters to external food-relevant cues. According to this theory, the food intake of restrained eaters is characterized by a conflict between two chronically accessible incentives or goals: eating enjoyment and weight control. Their difficulty in weig...

Mass public shootings are typically followed by a spike in gun sales as well as calls for stricter gun control laws. What remains unclear is whether the spike in gun sales is motivated by increased threat perceptions or by concerns about gun control, or whether the sales are mainly driven by non-owners purchasing guns or gun owners adding to their...

Americans are the world’s best armed citizens and public polling suggests protection/self-defense is their main reason for gun ownership. However, there is virtually no psychological research on gun ownership. The present article develops the first psychological process model of defensive gun ownership—specifically, a two-component model that consi...

The present research focused on bereaved parents’ perceived grief similarity, and aimed to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal effects of the perceptions that the partner has less, equal, or more grief intensity than oneself on relationship satisfaction. Participants of our longitudinal study were 229 heterosexual bereaved Dutch couples who...

In this article, I address the paradox that university grade point averages have increased for decades, whereas the time students invest in their studies has decreased. I argue that one major contributor to this paradox is grading leniency, encouraged by the practice of university administrators to base important personnel decisions on student eval...

In this review, we address the relationship of aging with creativity and innovation at work. Organizing our review around the triad of person, environment, and behavior, we first discuss relevant theories and empirical findings from the creativity/innovation and aging literatures, and then review meta-analytical and primary studies on the aging-cre...

Based on Bayesian reasoning, Ioannidis (2005) made the bold claim that most published research findings are false. His claim has been widely cited. It also seems consistent with the findings of the Open Science Collaboration Project that a majority of psychological studies could not be replicated. In this article, I argue (1) that Ioannidis' claim...

It is widely believed that new ideas in science come disproportionally from younger persons. There is little evidence to support this belief. Although research conducted before the turn of the century typically found a curvilinear relationship between scientific productivity and age, the single peak of this curve was around age 40 indicating that i...

There are two conflicting positions toward gun ownership in the United States. Proponents of stricter gun control argue that guns are responsible for 32,000 gun-related deaths each year and that the introduction of stricter gun control laws would reduce this death toll. Gun rights advocates argue that the general availability of guns reduces homici...

This study examined the effectiveness and feasibility of therapist-guided internet-delivered exposure (EX) and behavioral activation (BA) for complicated grief and rumination. Forty-seven bereaved individuals with elevated levels of complicated grief and grief rumination were randomly assigned to three conditions: EX (N = 18), BA (N = 17), or a wai...

Symptoms of psychopathology are associated with overgeneral memory retrieval. Overgeneral memory is hypothesized to be the result of an emotion regulatory process, dampening emotional reactions associated with retrieval of distressing specific memories. However, higher post-loss symptom severity has been related to higher specificity of loss-relate...

This brand new edition of the classic introduction to social psychology - the first to be written from a European perspective - has been given a new lease of life. While maintaining its European heritage and comprehensive coverage of the area, the book has been revamped across the board. * Changes to the fourth edition include improved accessibili...

Rumination, a risk factor in adjustment to bereavement, has often been considered a confrontation process. However, building on research on worry in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and rumination in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), researchers recently developed the Rumination as Avoidance Hypothesis (RAH), which states that rumination aft...

Objectives Rumination is a risk factor after bereavement, predicting higher concurrent and prospective symptom levels of complicated grief and depression in mourners. Research has shown that rumination may consist of adaptive and maladaptive subtypes, but there has been a paucity of research in this topic in the bereavement area. Therefore, we aime...

Rumination is a risk factor in adjustment to bereavement. It is associated with and predicts psychopathology after loss. Yet, the function of rumination in bereavement remains unclear. In the past, researchers often assumed rumination to be a maladaptive confrontation process. However, based on cognitive avoidance theories of worry in generalised a...

Despite the apparent centrality of guilt in complicating reactions following bereavement, scientific investigation has been limited. Establishing the impact of specific components associated with guilt could enhance understanding. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between two guilt-related manifestations, namely self-blame and...

The basic assumption of brainstorming is that increased quantity of ideas results in increased generation as well as selection of creative ideas. Although previous research suggests that idea quantity correlates strongly with the number of good ideas generated, quantity has been found to be unrelated to the quality of selected ideas. This article r...

Is self-disclosure of negative information a viable strategy for a company to lessen the damage done to consumer responses? Three experiments assessed whether self-disclosing negative information in itself lessened the damaging impact of this information compared to third-party disclosure of the same information. Results indicated that mere self-di...

Two different types of ruminative coping, depressive rumination and grief rumination, negatively influence bereavement outcome. Although grief-specific rumination is likely to be relevant in the bereavement context no internationally validated scale to measure grief rumination exists. Therefore, the current contribution aims to validate the Utrecht...

Jacob Max Rabbie, an internationally renowned social psychologist and a founding member of the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), died on June 29, 2013. Jaap was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, on October 4, 1927. Jaap studied social psychology at the University of Amsterdam and became the face of Dutch social psychology. His later...

There has been increasing criticism of the way psychologists conduct and analyze studies. These critiques as well as failures to replicate several high-profile studies have been used as justification to proclaim a "replication crisis" in psychology. Psychologists are encouraged to conduct more "exact" replications of published studies to assess the...

Over the course of a lifespan, most people will be confronted with the loss of a close relationship: if attachments have been formed, one is likely to have to suffer the consequences of separation. The term ‘bereavement’ refers to the situation of a person who has recently experienced the loss of someone significant in their lives through that pers...

Der Lehrbuch-Klassiker zur Einführung in die Sozialpsychologie! Jemanden lieben, miteinander streiten, zusammen arbeiten, gemeinsam lernen – das Leben steckt voller Sozialpsychologie, denn das vielseitige Fachgebiet beschäftigt sich damit, wie Gedanken, Gefühle und Verhalten von Menschen durch die Anwesenheit anderer Menschen beeinflusst werden. Hi...

The present study explores whether presenting specific palatable foods in close temporal proximity of stop signals in a go/no-go task decreases subsequent evaluations of such foods among participants with a relatively high appetite. Furthermore, we tested whether any decreased evaluations could mediate subsequent food choice. Participants first rec...

Ruminative coping has been associated with negative outcomes in bereavement. Rather than assuming it to be a problematic confrontation process, researchers have recently suggested rumination to be maladaptive through its links with avoidance processes. The main aim of this study was to examine, for the first time, whether the relationship between r...