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Publications in Social Psychology by NOMIS researchers

The Food Socioscope: A new instrument to better understand transitions towards greater sustainability

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 15, 2024

The Food Socioscope project aims to understand the systemic transition towards greater sustainability in the food sector. It has two main components: a participatory data collection with a community directory, and a comprehensive research effort. The first component builds a community of practitioners from various sectors (e.g., companies, NGOs, public authorities) who manage initiatives promoting food sustainability. This community, facilitated by the Food Socioscope Netboard, fosters knowledge exchange by publishing key characteristics of these initiatives online. The second component collects qualitative data through in-depth field interviews, site visits and videos with practitioners, following a rigorously tested protocol. This in-depth data, capturing activities from micro to macro levels, feeds into the research project to improve understanding of systemic change in food sustainability. The research spans the entire food supply chain and examines the supporting infrastructure and organizational setups. By analysing 600 initiatives, worldwide, within their broader contexts, the project aims to identify mechanisms of transition, including barriers and success factors. To collect, process and analyse its vast amount of qualitative data, in multiple languages, the project uses novel protocols, AI models, network analysis, and other quantitative methods. This paper presents the project and preliminary findings regarding regulation, the asymmetry of social contracts and the practitioners’ motivations.

Research field(s)
Sociology, Social Psychology

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.13935390

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2022

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 stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41467-021-27668-9

The Diversity Gap: When Diversity Matters for Knowledge

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

May 1, 2022

Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating why and how diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: Quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that to make progress with these why and how questions, we need first to rethink when one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity. In doing so, we highlight that the benefits of cognitive diversity are not equally distributed about collective intelligence tasks and are best seen for complex, multistage, creative problem solving, during problem posing and hypothesis generation. Throughout, we additionally outline a series of mechanisms relating diversity and problem complexity, and show how this perspective can inform metascience questions.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1177/17456916211006070

The role of anticipated regret in choosing for others

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2021

In everyday life, people sometimes find themselves making decisions on behalf of others, taking risks on another’s behalf, accepting the responsibility for these choices and possibly suffering regret for what they could have done differently. Previous research has extensively studied how people deal with risk when making decisions for others or when being observed by others. Here, we asked whether making decisions for present others is affected by regret avoidance. We studied value-based decision making under uncertainty, manipulating both whether decisions benefited the participant or a partner (beneficiary effect) and whether the partner watched the participant’s choices (audience effect) and their factual and counterfactual outcomes. Computational behavioural analysis revealed that participants were less mindful of regret (and more strongly driven by bigger risks) when choosing for others vs for themselves. Conversely, they chose more conservatively (regarding both regret and risk) when being watched vs alone. The effects of beneficiary and audience on anticipated regret counteracted each other, suggesting that participants’ financial and reputational interests impacted the feeling of regret independently.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41598-021-91635-z

Self-competence increases the willingness to pay for social influence

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2020

Theoretical works in social psychology and neuroscientific evidence have proposed that social rewards have intrinsic value, suggesting that people place a high premium on the ability to influence others. To test this hypothesis, we asked whether, and under what conditions, people are willing to forgo monetary reward for the sake of influencing others’ decisions. In four experiments, online and lab-based participants competed with a rival for influence over a client. The majority of participants sacrificed some of their financial reward to increase their chance of being selected over their rival within the experiment. Willingness to pay was affected by the participant’s current level of influence and performance, as participants were most likely to pay to promote their competence after having given good advice that had been ignored by the client using a situation where monetary incentives fail to explain human motivations, our experiments highlight the intrinsic value of social influence.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41598-020-74857-5

Do you hear what I see? An audio-visual paradigm to assess emotional egocentricity bias

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

May 18, 2020

We often use our own emotions to understand other people’s emotions. However, emotional egocentric biases (EEB), namely the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others’ emotions, may hinder this process, especially when emotions are incongruent. We capitalised on the classic EEB task to develop a new version that is easier to implement and control. Unlike the original EEB task that relies on a combination of private (e.g. touch) and public (e.g. vision) sensory information, our EEB task (AV-EEB) used audio-visual stimuli to evoke congruent/incongruent emotions in participants. Auditory and visual signals are both public, in that they can be shared among individuals, and make the task easier to implement and control. We provide lab-based and online validations of the AV-EEB, and demonstrate a positive relationship between EEB and social negative potency. This new, easily implemented version of the EEB task can accelerate the investigation of egocentricity biases in several research areas.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1080/02699931.2019.1683516

Going at the heart of social cognition: is there a role for interoception in self-other distinction?

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2018

Interoception describes the processing and awareness of bodily signals arising from visceral organs, essential for the organism’s homeostatic needs. Beyond homeostasis, the integration of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals is required for the coherence of bodily self-awareness. Here we suggest that interoception also plays a critical role in social cognition. Relating to others as individuals who are distinct from one’s self requires the simultaneous yet distinct co-representation of self and others. We propose that interoceptive awareness appears to stabilise the mental representation of one’s self as distinct from others. A more nuanced understanding of the role of interoception in the representation of others in relation to ourselves is vital to determine its importance in social cognition.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.008

Non-political anger shifts political preferences towards stronger leaders

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 1, 2018

Past research has shown that anger is associated with support for confrontational and punitive responses during crises, and notably with the endorsement of authoritarian ideologies. One important question is whether it is anger generated specifically in a political context that explains the association between anger and specific political preferences or whether any feeling of anger would be associated with changes in political attitudes. Here, we tested the effect of non-politically motivated incidental anger on the preference for strong leaders. In line with past research, we predicted that anger would increase preferences for strong leaders. Across two experiments, we exposed participants to an anger induction task. Before and after this experimental manipulation, we measured participants’ political leader preferences by asking them to choose between the faces of two leaders they would vote for in a hypothetical election. The level of self-reported anger predicted the probability of choosing more dominant-looking and less trustworthy-looking leaders after the induction, suggesting that even non-political incidental anger increases preferences for strong leaders.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41598-022-15765-8

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