Stephen Reicher’s research while affiliated with University of St Andrews and other places

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020 and then a pandemic on 11 March 2020. In early 2020, a group of UK scientists volunteered to provide the public with up-to-date and transparent scientific information. The group formed the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Independent SAGE) and provided live weekly briefings to the public via YouTube. In this Perspective, we describe how and why this group came together and the challenges it faced. We reflect on 4 years of scientific information broadcasting and discuss the guiding principles followed by Independent SAGE, which may be broadly transferable for strengthening the scientist-public dialogue during public health emergencies in future settings. We discuss the provision of clarity and transparency, engagement with the science-policy interface, the practice of interdisciplinarity, the centrality of addressing inequity, the need for dialogue and partnership with the public, the importance of support for advocacy groups, the diversification of communication channels and modalities, the adoption of regular and organized internal communications, the resourcing and support of the group's communications and the active opposition of misinformation and disinformation campaigns. We reflect on what we might do differently next time and propose research aimed at building the evidence base for optimizing informal scientific advisory groups in crisis situations.

We examine how social identity processes shape condoning of organisational corruption among onlookers. Two studies examined the willingness of outside observers to condone, or else condemn, corrupt actions of real organisations, a process we call ‘engaged onlookership’ building on the social identity approach to engaged followership. In both Study 1 (cross‐sectional) and Study 2 (experimental), we found that identification with a company guilty of malfeasance and identification with the monitoring agency who uncovered their scandal independently predicted opposing effects on condoning corruption, even while controlling for moral identity and demographic factors. These findings were then replicated and extended in Study 3 that made several methodological improvements upon previous studies. Results provided additional evidence of an indirect effect of the manipulation on condoning corruption through company identification. These findings provide support for an engaged onlookership model of corruption which posits that onlookers are more likely to endorse morally problematic behaviour when they believe it is performed by, and in the interests of, an organisation with which they identify.

OPEN ACCESS - Research highlights the long‐term collective effects of mass human rights violations (MHRVs) on survivors’ wellbeing. This multi‐method, multi‐context paper combines the social identity approach (SIA), transitional and social justice theories and human rights‐conceptualised wellbeing to propose a human rights understanding of trauma responses and experiences in the context of MHRVs. In Study 1, ethnographic research in four locations in Kosova, 5 years post war indicates that lack of perceived conflict‐related and social justice is experienced as a key contributor to survivors’ individual and collective wellbeing. In Study 2, 61 semi‐structured interviews with MHRVs survivors from post‐war Kosova, post‐conflict Northern Ireland and post‐dictatorship Albania two to three decades post conflict also show that such justice experiences inform wellbeing. These studies illustrate the importance of expanding the SIA to health and trauma theories by taking account of a human rights‐conceptualised wellbeing as well as adopting a holistic analysis of justice perception.

In this paper, we conceptualize the days of mourning that followed the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. as constituting a liminal occasion, a moment of in‐betweenness through which we can explore sense‐making in times of transition. How do people navigate through liminal occasions, and are they always transformative? Through a rapid response ethnography ( N interviews = 64, N participants = 122), we were able to capture the raw moments within which a collective comes together, as part of a national ritual, to transition from ‘here’ to ‘there’. In our data, liminality prompted participants to strategically define British national identity and its future by positioning the Queen as representative of Britishness, her loss as a national identity loss. No longer taken for granted, participants reasserted the value of the monarchy as an apolitical and unifying feature in an otherwise divided society, characterizing the continuity of the institution as an essential part of British identity and society. The analysis illustrates how liminality offers a useful conceptual tool for addressing how temporality and change are negotiated in relation to a shared identity, and how navigating transitional moments brings with it political implications for the future.

In this paper, we examine how social identity, moral obligation and the relationship between the two shaped support for the 2016 Academics for Peace petition in Turkey. We examine the pre‐trial statements of nine defendants charged for signing the petition and appearing in court on the same day in December 2018. We first conduct an inductive thematic analysis on one statement, and then, using the themes from this analysis, we conducted a deductive thematic analysis on the remaining eight statements. In line with the existing studies, we find considerable evidence that social identity and moral obligation are invoked as key reasons for signing in this highly repressive context. However, rather than these being separate factors, the two are reciprocally constitutive. That is, social identities define moral obligations and, at the same time, enacting moral obligations defines identity (both the position of the individual in the group and the nature of the group in the world). In discussion, we consider the broader implications of a moralized view of social identities for our understanding of both collective action and social identity processes more generally.

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 intergroup relations. The sample comprised 368 Dutch participants with an Antillean (n = 126), Chinese (n = 118), or Surinamese (n = 124) ethnic background. Results indicated that those who identified strongly with their ethnic group and who perceived other (so-called ‘native’) Dutch people as having negative perceptions of their ethnic group, reported greater levels of misrecognition and discrimination. In turn, higher levels of misrecognition and perceived discrimination were associated with participants reporting lower levels of Dutch identification, lower levels of trust in Dutch authorities, and a greater willingness to exhibit collective action on behalf of their ethnic group. Specifically, misrecognition was more strongly associated with Dutch identification and trust in Dutch authorities, while perceived discrimination was more strongly associated with collective action tendencies. These findings point to the practical and theoretical importance of misrecognition: Both the experience of discrimination and misrecognition are relevant to understanding the sustainable integration of ethnic minorities in multi-cultural societies.