The study, published in Current Psychology by Xinwei Hong, Haiyan Lv, Zhaoli Qu, Hang Fan, and Lin Zhang, draws on three well-established theoretical frameworks from social psychology: the common ingroup identity model, the social identity model of collective action, and the social identity model of collective resilience. Each of these traditions addresses a different piece of the puzzle. The common ingroup identity model, developed originally by Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio, proposes that recasting memberships in separate groups as membership in a single, more inclusive superordinate group can reduce intergroup bias and foster cooperation. The social identity model of collective action, associated with researchers such as Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues, identifies identity, efficacy, and moral outrage as core drivers of people’s willingness to act collectively. The social identity model of collective resilience, advanced by John Drury and colleagues, explains how shared identification within emergent groups helps people cope with disasters and emergencies. By combining these perspectives, the authors sought to explain not only whether a shared sense of “we” promotes prosocial collective action, but also the psychological pathway through which that influence travels.

The research program consisted of two studies with a combined sample of 933 participants. Study 1 used a correlational design, measuring participants’ perceptions of common ingroup identity, hope, group efficacy, common fate, and their tendencies toward prosocial collective action. The results showed that common ingroup identity positively predicted prosocial collective action, and that this relationship was carried along a sequential pathway: a shared identity first fostered hope, hope in turn strengthened beliefs in the group’s collective efficacy, and those efficacy beliefs then translated into a readiness to act for the common good. Importantly, the strength of this indirect pathway depended on how much participants perceived a common fate binding their group together. When common fate was perceived as strong, the motivational chain from identity through hope and efficacy to action was amplified.

Study 2 moved beyond correlation by experimentally manipulating both the type of group identity that participants were led to adopt and the valence of the common fate they were told their group faced. The findings replicated the pattern observed in the first study, providing stronger grounds for causal inference. In addition, Study 2 revealed a further layer of nuance: the valence of common fate moderated the link between hope and group efficacy, as well as the link between group efficacy and prosocial collective action. In other words, whether the shared future people anticipated was positive or negative changed how hope and efficacy interacted to fuel action. These findings clarify the mechanisms underlying prosocial collective action and extend the social identity model of collective action by embedding hope, efficacy, and common fate into a single moderated serial mediation framework.

The emphasis on hope as a group-based emotion deserves particular attention. Hope has traditionally been studied at the individual level, but a growing body of work treats it as an experience people hold on behalf of their groups. Research by Smadar Cohen-Chen and colleagues on intergroup conflict has shown that hope about the possibility of change can loosen entrenched attitudes and open the door to support for conciliatory action. Cohen-Chen and Martijn van Zomeren further demonstrated that group efficacy beliefs predict collective action most strongly when hope is high, suggesting that the two constructs operate as a motivational system rather than in isolation. The present study’s serial mediation design is consistent with this view: hope does not merely accompany efficacy beliefs, it appears to build them, in line with Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build account of positive emotions, which holds that positive emotional states widen people’s thought-action repertoires and help them accumulate durable psychological resources over time.

Common fate is a concept with a long pedigree in social psychology. Classic work on entitativity, the perception that a collection of people forms a coherent group, identified shared fate as one of the strongest cues leading observers to see an aggregate of individuals as a genuine entity. When people believe that they will succeed or suffer together, whether because of a pandemic, a flood, or a changing climate, the psychological boundary between “us” and “them” becomes less consequential. Prior research on global social identity has shown that inducing a shared human identity can increase cooperation in economic games across national boundaries, and studies of disaster response have documented how emergencies can dissolve preexisting social divisions as people come to see themselves as survivors facing a common threat. The present findings add that the valence of that shared future matters: a common fate framed in positive terms appears to sustain the hope-efficacy pathway differently than one framed in negative terms, a distinction with practical implications for how crises are communicated.

The distinction between prosocial collective action and other forms of collective behavior is also relevant here. Much of the collective action literature has focused on protest and contestation, often by disadvantaged groups challenging the status quo. Prosocial collective action, by contrast, refers to cooperative efforts to benefit others or the broader community, such as volunteering, mutual aid, resource sharing, and coordinated helping during emergencies. Research during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated this form of action vividly: studies found that people who identified more strongly with their local communities were more likely to engage in coordinated helping, and that this helping was associated with mental health benefits for both givers and receivers. Work on social identification and risk perception similarly showed that shared identity shaped how people appraised personal and collective risk and whether they adopted preventive behaviors. The present study situates prosocial collective action within the same motivational architecture that has been used to explain protest, suggesting that identity, hope, and efficacy operate across both domains.

The findings also speak to a long-standing debate about the costs and benefits of promoting superordinate identities. Critics have argued that emphasizing a common identity can defuse the grievances of disadvantaged groups and undermine support for structural change, a concern captured in critiques of prejudice-reduction approaches that prioritize harmony over justice. Research among historically disadvantaged communities has shown that intergroup contact and common identity do not necessarily dampen collective action and can, under some conditions, support solidarity-based action on behalf of other groups. Studies of indigenous activism in Latin America have found that common ingroup identity can coexist with, and even strengthen, willingness to act. The present research adds a constructive note to this debate by showing that a common ingroup identity, particularly when paired with a salient common fate, can mobilize prosocial action rather than merely pacify conflict.

Methodologically, the combination of a large correlational study and a follow-up experiment strengthens the evidential basis of the conclusions. Correlational designs can establish that the measured variables covary as theory predicts, but they cannot rule out all alternative explanations, such as reverse causation or the influence of unmeasured third variables. The experimental manipulation of identity type and common fate valence in Study 2 addresses this limitation directly, allowing the authors to make stronger causal claims about the roles of these constructs. The moderated serial mediation model itself represents a methodological advance over simpler mediation tests, because it captures a chain of influence in which one mediator feeds into another, and simultaneously tests how a moderator changes the strength of links within that chain.

For practitioners, the results suggest several actionable levers. Public health campaigns, climate communication, and disaster preparedness programs often struggle to motivate action across group boundaries, whether those boundaries are national, ethnic, political, or generational. The findings imply that messages emphasizing a shared identity and a shared future may be more effective than messages that target individuals in isolation. Framing a crisis in terms of common fate, particularly when that framing highlights achievable positive outcomes, may cultivate the hope that in turn builds collective efficacy. Communicators should be attentive to valence: while threat-based messaging can capture attention, the present results indicate that the emotional and motivational consequences of a shared future depend on whether it is framed as hopeful or foreboding. Community organizations seeking to coordinate volunteers, mutual aid networks, or collective adaptation efforts may benefit from practices that reinforce a superordinate “we,” such as inclusive language, shared rituals, and joint planning across group lines.

The study’s limitations point toward future research directions. The samples were drawn from a single cultural context, and norms around collective action, hope, and group identification vary considerably across societies, so cross-cultural replication remains an open question. The measurement of prosocial collective action relied on self-report tendencies rather than observed behavior, and longitudinal designs would be needed to establish how identity, hope, efficacy, and common fate influence one another over time as a crisis unfolds. Future work might also examine whether the serial pathway holds for other emotions, such as anger or despair, which prior research has linked to collective action in different ways, and whether interventions that experimentally strengthen common fate perceptions can produce durable increases in prosocial behavior. As climate change and other transboundary crises continue to test the capacity of diverse societies to act together, understanding the psychological conditions under which people come to see themselves as sharing one fate, and one capacity to respond, becomes an increasingly urgent scientific and practical task.

Subject of Research: How common ingroup identity and common fate influence prosocial collective action through hope and group efficacy

Article Title: Breathe together and share a common fate: the effect of common ingroup identity on prosocial collective action

Article References: Hong, X., Lv, H., Qu, Z., Fan, H., & Zhang, L. (2026). Breathe together and share a common fate: the effect of common ingroup identity on prosocial collective action. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1428. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09977-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09977-8

Keywords: common ingroup identity, prosocial collective action, common fate, hope, group efficacy, social identity, collective resilience, intergroup relations, climate change, pandemics, social psychology, Current Psychology

The research team, led by Dominika Adamczyk together with Natalia Korczak and Marta Marchlewska, defined veg*n conspiracy beliefs as convictions that vegans and vegetarians secretly seek to manipulate and control individuals and societies by restricting meat consumption and imposing a single dietary ideology. This goes well beyond ordinary criticism. Someone might question the nutritional profile of a plant-based burger or debate the environmental footprint of different diets without invoking hidden actors. Conspiracy beliefs, by contrast, involve allegations of secret, coordinated actions by powerful and malevolent forces. The distinction matters, the authors argue, because the two phenomena likely have different psychological roots and different social consequences.

The theoretical starting point was collective narcissism, a construct first formalized in social psychology in 2009. Unlike secure group pride, collective narcissism is characterized by a belief that one’s group is exceptional and uniquely deserving of recognition, yet is chronically underappreciated and disrespected by others. Decades of research have linked this defensive identity to heightened sensitivity to intergroup threat, aggressive reactions to criticism, and endorsement of conspiracy theories portraying the ingroup as the target of hostile plots. National collective narcissism has been tied to beliefs that a 2010 plane crash in Poland was a Russian conspiracy, that climate science is fabricated by elites in France, and that the 2016 American election was stolen. The Polish team wondered whether the same mechanism operates around something as seemingly mundane as diet.

Food, after all, is far from apolitical. Dietary practices express values, connect people to communities, and serve as markers of social identity. Previous research has shown that vegetarians and vegans tend to be more liberal and egalitarian, less conservative, lower in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, and higher in empathy than omnivores. Because morally motivated lifestyle choices can implicitly challenge the moral adequacy of the majority’s habits, meat-eaters often react defensively, perceiving vegans as judgmental or arrogant. Meat consumption is also symbolically linked to masculinity and dominance in many cultures, adding a gendered dimension to the perceived threat. In this charged context, the researchers hypothesized that people with a narcissistic attachment to meat-eaters as a group would be especially prone to seeing the plant-based movement as a coordinated, hostile enterprise.

To test this, the team conducted three studies among meat-eaters in Poland, using nationwide probability samples. The first study surveyed 1,011 participants and measured meat-eater collective narcissism with adapted items such as meat-eaters deserve special treatment, alongside ordinary meat-eater identification, a newly developed nine-item scale of veg*n conspiracy beliefs, national narcissism and identification, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. The conspiracy scale included items proposing that the vegan movement is striving to take control of the food production system, that restricting access to meat is part of a broader strategy to control societies worldwide, and that covert dietary indoctrination targets children from meat-eating families in schools. The scale proved highly reliable, and factor analysis supported a single underlying dimension.

The results were striking. Meat-eater collective narcissism predicted veg*n conspiracy beliefs even after accounting for ordinary identification with meat-eaters, national narcissism, national identification, authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. Crucially, plain meat-eater identification showed no unique effect once narcissism was controlled. In other words, it is not simply belonging to the dietary majority that fuels conspiratorial suspicion; it is a defensive, entitled version of that belonging. Interestingly, secure national identification was negatively associated with the conspiracy beliefs, hinting that non-narcissistic forms of group attachment may actually protect against conspiratorial interpretations of social change.

The second study moved from correlation to experiment. Roughly 800 participants were randomly assigned to read one of two fabricated articles. The experimental article framed meat consumption as natural, socially important, and unfairly criticized, emphasizing that meat-eaters are increasingly portrayed negatively despite representing a historically normal and healthy way of life. The control article described how eating habits are diverse and shaped by many factors, without any identity-boosting content. The manipulation worked: participants who read the boosting article reported higher meat-eater collective narcissism, and, critically, they also endorsed veg*n conspiracy beliefs significantly more strongly than the control group. This experimental finding suggests that inflating defensive group pride can causally increase conspiratorial thinking about the dietary outgroup, not merely accompany it.

The third study, with 569 participants, extended the analysis to a darker outcome: blatant dehumanization. Using the Ascent of Man measure, in which participants rate how evolved they consider various groups on a visual scale from ape to modern human, the researchers assessed how far vegans and vegetarians were pushed down the evolutionary ladder. Meat-eater collective narcissism predicted dehumanization of vegns, and this relationship was partially mediated by vegn conspiracy beliefs. The indirect effect held even after controlling for general conspiracy thinking, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and national identity measures. The pattern suggests a psychological pathway in which defensive identity threat gives rise to narratives of a secret, malevolent movement, which in turn license seeing members of that movement as less than fully human.

The authors are careful about the limits of their claims. All three studies were conducted in Poland, a society where meat consumption remains dominant, so generalization to other cultural contexts is an open question. The mediation model in the third study is theoretically grounded but cross-sectional, meaning alternative explanations, such as conspiracy beliefs and dehumanization being parallel outcomes of collective narcissism, cannot be ruled out. The experimental study also suffered from a high exclusion rate due to failed attention checks, a known challenge of online survey research. Future work, the team suggests, should test whether similar mechanisms operate among vegans themselves, whether masculinity threat amplifies the effect, and whether interventions that strengthen analytical thinking or highlight shared superordinate identities can dampen the conspiratorial response.

Even with those caveats, the findings carry a broader message about how social change is received. When food becomes a marker of group identity, disagreements over what people eat can extend far beyond personal preference and become a source of conspiracy thinking and intergroup hostility. The researchers note that history offers abundant examples of dietary practices becoming symbols of larger conflicts, from religious prohibitions to political battles over food production. Their results suggest that advocates of dietary change face a delicate challenge: promoting new norms without triggering the perceptions of intergroup threat that transform disagreement into paranoia. Understanding that conspiracy beliefs about vegans may function as a defensive shield for a threatened identity could help design communication strategies that reduce hostility rather than deepen the divide between the dinner-table camps of modern society.

Subject of Research: Psychological links between meat-eater collective narcissism, vegan conspiracy beliefs, and dehumanization of vegetarians and vegans

Article Title: Another one bites the dust? Threatened meat-eater identity and veg*n conspiracy beliefs

Article References: Adamczyk, D., Korczak, N., & Marchlewska, M. (2026). Another one bites the dust? Threatened meat-eater identity and veg*n conspiracy beliefs. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1899432. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1899432

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1899432

Keywords: collective narcissism, conspiracy beliefs, veganism, vegetarianism, meat consumption, social identity, dehumanization, intergroup relations, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, dietary identity, Poland

The research team asked a deceptively simple question: when do humans start caring about the formidability of the groups they affiliate with, and does this motive differ between the sexes? Formidability, in the language of evolutionary psychology, refers to a group’s capacity to prevail in conflict, and across the animal kingdom it is often a function of sheer numbers. Male lions roar to advertise coalition size, chimpanzees patrol borders with numerical assessment in mind, and dolphins form super-alliances whose advantages scale with membership. Humans, too, have long been theorized to possess coalitional psychology tuned to group size, but the developmental origins of this sensitivity, and its gendered structure, had remained unresolved.

To answer the question, the investigators deployed the same kind of minimal, abstract group stimuli across three distinct life stages, a methodological choice that allowed direct comparison from infancy to adulthood. Preverbal infants watched animated scenes featuring novel agents belonging to groups of different sizes. Preschool children, aged roughly three to six, were familiarized with similar abstract groups and then asked which members they liked or preferred. Adults completed comparable preference measures alongside a battery of political attitude scales. Because the stimuli were stripped of any real-world social markers such as ethnicity, language or gender, any preferences that emerged could be attributed to group size itself rather than to learned cultural associations.

The results were striking in their asymmetry. Among 317 preschool children, boys reliably preferred members of the majority group over members of the minority, while girls showed no such preference, distributing their choices without regard to group size. Among 180 preverbal infants, by contrast, neither boys nor girls chose systematically between majority and minority members; their selections were essentially random. This developmental dissociation is critical. It suggests that the capacity to represent groups and even to infer dominance from numerical superiority is present well before language, consistent with earlier work showing that infants expect larger groups to win conflicts and expect novel agents to join majorities. Yet the motivational pull of the larger group, the desire to affiliate with it, appears only later, once children begin navigating peer relationships independently.

This timing is theoretically meaningful. Infants may understand, in an abstract sense, that bigger groups are more powerful, but they do not yet act on that understanding as a social preference. Preschoolers, by contrast, are entering a world of alliances, friendships and rough-and-tumble play in which coalitional dynamics become personally consequential. Prior research has documented that boys, more than girls, gravitate toward group-based interaction and play fighting, and that coalitional play may serve as a rehearsal ground for intergroup aggression. The new findings suggest that somewhere in the transition from infancy to preschool, a preference for size and strength crystallizes in boys in a way it does not in girls, transforming a cold cognitive representation of power into a hot motivational orientation.

The adult data extend the story into the political realm with remarkable scale. Across 3,467 adults, men liked majority groups more than women did, replicating the childhood pattern. More provocatively, the strength of these coalitional preferences correlated with political ideology. Participants who showed stronger affinity for large, formidable groups also expressed greater support for sustaining intergroup hierarchies, including harsher attitudes toward ethnic minorities, more militaristic foreign policy stances, and greater opposition to social welfare programs. The correlation was robust across analytical approaches, and the researchers used Bayesian methods to quantify the evidence, with data and analysis files made publicly available through the Open Science Framework.

These adult findings dovetail with decades of work on social dominance orientation, a construct introduced by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto to capture individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy. One of the most replicated findings in political psychology is that men score higher than women on this orientation, a pattern documented across cultures and even linked to common genetic underpinnings in twin studies. What the new research adds is a developmental origin story: the gender gap in hierarchy preferences may not be manufactured by adult socialization alone but may trace back to the coalitional motives that emerge when boys first begin forming peer groups. In this view, political ideology is not merely a set of learned positions but, in part, an expression of ancient motivational systems that come online in early childhood.

The authors are careful about what the data do and do not show. The study demonstrates that gendered preferences for group formidability appear early and predict ideology, but it cannot fully disentangle the contributions of biology and socialization. Boys and girls are treated differently from birth, steered toward different toys, activities and social scripts, and any of these channels could shape the observed pattern. Twin and family studies suggesting heritable components to social dominance orientation complicate a purely environmental account, but the present findings alone cannot adjudicate between an evolved predisposition, a socially constructed one, or, most plausibly, an interplay of both. What the study does establish is a timeline: the motive is absent in preverbal infancy and present in preschool, narrowing the developmental window in which the relevant processes must operate.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. If preferences for formidable majorities take root in the preschool years, interventions aimed at reducing prejudice and hierarchy-endorsing ideology might need to begin far earlier than is typical. Educational programs targeting intergroup attitudes often start in middle childhood or adolescence, precisely because that is when explicit prejudice becomes measurable. The new findings hint that the motivational scaffolding for such attitudes is already in place years earlier, at least for boys, and that the playground is where the first hierarchy-building decisions are made. They also resonate with research on the male warrior hypothesis, which proposes that men’s greater investment in intergroup conflict reflects an evolutionary history in which male coalitions were the primary instruments of warfare.

For a field increasingly interested in the deep roots of political behavior, the study offers a compelling synthesis. The same abstract preference for joining the bigger, stronger side, visible in three-year-old boys choosing between cartoon groups, reappears in adult men as a measurable component of their ideological profiles, predicting attitudes on ethnic persecution, militarism and welfare. The continuity across such vastly different contexts, from a nursery task to a national political survey, is what makes the finding viral in its implications. It suggests that the psychology of group dominance is not a late-blooming ideological acquisition but an early-emerging motivational system, gendered from its inception, that quietly shapes how individuals relate to power, coalitions and the distribution of resources long before they can articulate what politics even means. As the authors conclude, gendered motives for intergroup formidability appear rooted in the earliest years of childhood, once children begin navigating peer relationships on their own, and they may echo through a lifetime of social and political choices.

Subject of Research: Developmental and political psychology of gendered preferences for group formidability across the lifespan

Article Title: Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults

Article References: Fonn, E. K., Zahl, J. H., Kristensen, B. D., & Thomsen, L. (2026). Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Keywords: social dominance orientation, group formidability, child development, political ideology, intergroup relations, coalitional psychology, preschoolers, gender differences, social hierarchy, Nature Human Behaviour, evolutionary psychology, prejudice

The theoretical foundation of the study rests on Social Representations Theory, a framework first proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici in 1961. The theory examines the commonsense knowledge that groups produce through social communication, and it identifies two core processes: objectification, in which abstract ideas become concrete and real, and anchoring, in which new information is integrated into pre-existing systems of thought. Crucially, later work by William Doise and colleagues argued that social representations are not necessarily sets of fully shared beliefs. Instead, they function as organizing principles of position-taking, meaning that people can hold divergent, even opposing, views of the same object while remaining anchored in a common symbolic framework. This insight is what makes the Brazilian case so revealing: consensus and dissensus coexist, structured by deeper shared principles.

Brazil offers a particularly fertile setting for such an investigation. The country’s contemporary political landscape is marked by intense polarization, weakening democratic institutions, and the strategic mobilization of historical narratives by political actors seeking to reshape collective memory along ideological lines. The authors note that the traditional founding myth of racial democracy, the idea that Brazil’s identity rests on harmonious fusion of white, Black, and indigenous peoples, has lost its unifying power. As animosity between political camps has grown, this myth has diluted, leaving social groups more distant from one another and national identities more fragmented. In a polarized environment, competing versions of the past become weapons in symbolic conflicts over the present.

To capture these dynamics empirically, the researchers recruited 420 Brazilian adults through online channels, including messaging groups and university networks, supplemented by snowball sampling. The sample included 173 participants aged 18 to 30, 111 aged 45 to 65, 98 aged 30 to 45, and 9 over 65. Women made up 63 percent of respondents, and politically, 38.2 percent identified with the Left, 34.7 percent with the Center, 9.5 percent with the Right, and 17.6 percent with no political camp. Each participant rated their positive and negative emotions toward ten historical events on a seven-point scale: the Arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family, Independence, Abolition of Slavery, the Proclamation of the Republic, the Military Dictatorship, the Free Vote Movement, the 1988 Federal Constitution, the Real Plan, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2022 presidential election.

The analytical engine of the study was Latent Profile Analysis, a statistical technique conducted in RStudio that identifies hidden subgroups within a sample based on patterns of responses. Similar in spirit to factor analysis, LPA uses mixture modeling to cluster individuals who answer in statistically similar ways, producing mutually exclusive profiles. The researchers evaluated competing models using three indicators: the Akaike Information Criterion and the Bayesian Information Criterion, both of which favor simpler, more efficient models with lower values, and Entropy, which measures classification accuracy on a scale from 0 to 1. After balancing these indicators, a six-subgroup model emerged as the best statistical fit, revealing six distinct ways of emotionally positioning oneself toward Brazilian history.

The first profile, labeled Nationalists, tended to rate highly positive those events that showcased Brazilian autonomy and initiative, such as Independence, the Proclamation of the Republic, and the homegrown economic stabilization program known as the Real Plan, while rating lower events in which Brazil did not take the leading role, like the arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family. A second profile, the Youth Nationalists, shared much of this national pride but diverged in evaluating the 1980s: they rated the Free Vote Movement and the 1988 Constitution lower, while expressing strong positivity toward the 2022 election. As their name suggests, 58.1 percent of this group was under 30, illustrating how social insertion, in this case generational position, shapes position-taking on the national past.

The Democrats profile, representing 8.8 percent of the sample and composed predominantly of women with left-wing affiliations, celebrated events embodying equality and citizenship, such as the Free Vote Movement and the Citizen Constitution of 1988, while rating the Royal Family’s arrival and the Military Dictatorship negatively. Intriguingly, this group also rated Abolition of Slavery lower than other profiles did. The authors interpret this not as a rejection of emancipation but as a historically informed disillusionment: abolition in 1888 functioned largely as a legal rupture that left the hierarchies of the slaveholding elite intact, and the Democrats’ enthusiasm for the 1988 Constitution suggests they value events that produced genuine structural change over symbolic milestones that did not. The Oligarchs profile, by contrast, was exclusively male and half right-leaning, and it rated events concentrating power in specific groups, such as the Royal Family’s arrival and the Military Dictatorship, very positively, while disfavoring egalitarian moments like the Republic’s proclamation and the 1988 Constitution.

Two further profiles completed the picture. The Historical Constants, 7.38 percent of the sample, rated nearly all events uniformly high, above 4.5 except for the dictatorship, showing little differentiation. Drawing on prior cross-cultural research by Hanke and colleagues, the authors interpret this consistency not as disengagement but as a distinct evaluative orientation marked by low polarization and a preference for non-extreme positions. Finally, the Republicans, the largest profile at 45.47 percent, displayed strongly polarized ratings: extreme positivity toward Independence, the Republic’s proclamation, abolition, the 1988 Constitution, and the 2022 election, paired with sharp negativity toward the dictatorship and monarchical power. Predominantly female and left-affiliated, this group exemplifies what Doise described as emotionally charged consensus anchored in core moral beliefs, a cohesive collective narrative celebrating democratic institutions and civic engagement.

Perhaps the study’s most striking theoretical contribution lies in what unites these six divergent profiles. Despite their conflicting evaluations, all subgroups appear organized around a single common principle: an orientation toward a project for society and an imagined collective future. The same event can serve as a utopia for one group and a dystopia for another, a future to be achieved or a future to be avoided. Building on work by Zittoun and Gillespie on collective imagination and by de Saint-Laurent on the role of memory in envisioning possible futures, the authors argue that remembering is fundamentally future-oriented. Groups select which past events to valorize in order to delineate the society they wish to construct, effectively sketching competing versions of Brazilian national identity. The authors caution that their sample, recruited online and overrepresenting left-leaning participants, does not fully represent Brazil’s population, and that the single-item emotional scale cannot capture participants’ subjective meanings directly. Still, the findings carry practical weight: in a world marked by rising polarization, understanding how groups use memory to imagine the future may illuminate not only what divides societies, but also what could bring them together.

Subject of Research: Group variations in emotional position-taking toward major Brazilian historical events and their link to imagined collective futures

Article Title: Historical Memories of Great Brazilian Events: Group Variations in Position-Taking

Article References: Eskinazi, R., de Fátima de Souza Santos, M., & Wagoner, B. (2026). Historical Memories of Great Brazilian Events: Group Variations in Position-Taking. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00517-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00517-8

Keywords: collective memory, social representations, Brazil, historical memory, Latent Profile Analysis, social psychology, polarization, national identity, political affiliation, collective future, Trends in Psychology, intergroup relations

Türkiye hosts millions of forcibly displaced people, which makes social integration a national priority rather than an abstract policy goal. Schools occupy a pivotal position in this process, because they are the primary arenas where young people from different origins encounter one another daily and where the cognitive seeds of either social cohesion or intergroup conflict are sown. Despite this, comparatively few studies have directly compared how Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students conceptualize the term refugee within the same educational settings. The research team, Orhan Ünal and Murat Bayram Yilar of Ondokuz Mayıs University and Yıldıray Karadağ of Süleyman Demirel University, designed their investigation precisely to fill this gap by examining the cognitive structures of children enrolled in schools with high enrolment of forcibly displaced students.

Methodologically, the study employed a multi-stage descriptive design. The Word Association Test asks participants to produce the words that a given stimulus concept evokes, and it is prized by researchers because it bypasses deliberative self-presentation and surfaces underlying perceptions and perspectives. In this study, the technique was applied to students in the 10-to-15 age bracket, a developmental window during which social attitudes are actively consolidating. The researchers then subjected the resulting word pools to descriptive analysis, determining frequency distributions and statistical cut-off points for the associated words, and to thematic analysis, which organized the semantic content of those words into coherent conceptual categories. A comparative layer of analysis then identified the similarities and differences in conceptual structures across the three participant groups, while correspondence analysis tested whether the thematic profiles of the groups differed in statistically significant ways.

The results show that for Turkish students, the themes of Security and Threat, Country and Geography, and Negative Perception, Blaming, and Othering carried substantial weight in their perceptions of refugees. In other words, the concept activated associations with borders, belonging, and perceived risk, together with attributions of fault and processes of social exclusion. These associations are characteristic of a majority group’s perspective, in which the displaced population is construed primarily as an external collective whose presence requires explanation, management, or judgment. The prominence of threat-related content in children’s mental maps is particularly noteworthy, because such cognitive structures, once entrenched, are known to predict intergroup anxiety and support for exclusionary social policies in adulthood.

Yet the Turkish students’ cognitive maps were not monolithically negative. The analysis also surfaced themes of Positive Perspective and Attributes, together with Sadness and Compassion, revealing a genuine undercurrent of empathy and solidarity among host-community children. This duality is analytically important: it suggests that the concept of refugee in these students’ minds is contested ground, where exclusionary framings coexist with humanitarian ones. For educators and policymakers, the coexistence of both clusters within the same cognitive structures represents an opportunity, because interventions can amplify the empathetic associations rather than needing to construct prosocial attitudes from nothing.

The profiles of the Syrian and Iraqi students were qualitatively different in ways that reflect lived experience. Their associations centered on themes bound up with forced displacement itself: Poverty and the Struggle for Survival, Violence and Death, and Physical and Emotional Pain. For these children, the term refugee is not an external social category but a compressed autobiography, a linguistic container for memories of conflict, loss, deprivation, and the physical and psychological costs of flight. The research also found that Syrian and Iraqi students associated the concept with a search for hope, indicating that even within profoundly painful semantic fields, displaced children maintain a forward-looking, aspirational dimension to their self-understanding.

Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique that visualizes the relationships between categorical variables in a shared space, confirmed that the thematic divergence between the Turkish group on one side and the Syrian and Iraqi groups on the other was statistically significant. This formal confirmation matters because it rules out the possibility that the observed differences were merely anecdotal or the product of random variation in word choice. Instead, the data indicate two meaningfully distinct cognitive geographies of the same concept: one organized around the vantage point of the receiving society, oscillating between threat and compassion, and the other organized around the vantage point of displacement, oscillating between trauma and hope.

The psychological implications of this divergence extend well beyond the classroom. Cognitive structures of the kind captured by the Word Association Test function as interpretive lenses through which subsequent social information is filtered. When host-community children’s mental maps foreground threat and blame, everyday interactions with displaced peers risk being encoded through suspicion, reinforcing stereotype and fueling a self-perpetuating cycle of othering. Conversely, when displaced children’s associations are dominated by pain and loss, their sense of belonging in the school environment may remain fragile, particularly if the peer environment validates exclusionary narratives. The study suggests that these two cognitive worlds currently operate side by side in Turkish schools, with limited semantic overlap between how the host and displaced groups understand who a refugee is.

The authors argue that the findings make a direct case for targeted educational interventions designed to reduce stereotypical and exclusionary associations and to strengthen empathy, perspective-taking, and shared human values. Because the Word Association Test exposes the raw material of children’s conceptual thinking, the same technique can serve as a diagnostic instrument before and after such interventions, allowing educators to measure whether exclusionary word clusters shrink and empathetic ones expand. The researchers specifically recommend that schools and educators use these insights to challenge exclusionary narratives, promote inclusive peer relations, and create supportive environments that foster the inclusion and well-being of children from forced-migration backgrounds. In practice, this could involve structured contact programs, collaborative learning, and curricular approaches that reframe the refugee concept around common humanity rather than difference.

As displacement continues to reshape societies across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond, this study offers a rare quantitative glimpse into the earliest cognitive layer where integration succeeds or fails: the associative networks children build around a single word. The contrast between Turkish students’ security-laden but partially empathetic maps and Syrian and Iraqi students’ trauma-tinged but hopeful ones encapsulates the central challenge of diverse classrooms. The same term that evokes borders and burden for one child evokes graves and survival for another, and only deliberate educational design can bridge that gap. Published as open-access research with ethics approval from Ondokuz Mayıs University and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki with parental consent and children’s right to withdraw, the study provides both the evidence and the methodological toolkit for educators willing to begin that work, transforming the mental map of refugee from a marker of division into a shared terrain of understanding.

Subject of Research: Cognitive structures and perceptions of the concept of refugee among Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi secondary school students

Article Title: The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students

Article References: Ünal, O., Karadağ, Y., & Yilar, M. B. (2026). The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Keywords: refugee perception, word association test, cognitive structure, Turkish students, Syrian students, Iraqi students, social integration, inclusive education, forced displacement, child psychology, intergroup relations, Türkiye

The review, led by Johanna Ray Vollhardt of Clark University together with Hu Young Jeong of the University of Virginia, Zsolt P. Szabó of Corvinus University Budapest and Eötvös Loránd University, and Khaled Elazab of Clark University, synthesizes decades of research from social psychology, clinical and counselling psychology, liberation psychology, and adjacent disciplines. Its central contribution is a unifying structure: an appraisal–coping framework that organizes the sprawling literature on collective victimization beliefs into the phases long used to understand individual stress — primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, coping efforts, and coping outcomes. By mapping group-level beliefs onto this sequence, the authors offer a technically precise way to predict when collective victimization produces destructive consequences and when it instead gives rise to constructive ones.

The framework begins with primary appraisal, the initial assessment of whether an event threatens the group or offers an opportunity. Applied collectively, this stage encompasses beliefs about the severity, intentionality, and temporal scope of harm. A community may appraise a massacre as an existential threat to its survival, as a historical injustice that demands redress, or as a completed chapter of the past. Each reading carries distinct emotional signatures. Appraisals of ongoing threat generate fear and collective angst — the dread that the group’s future vitality is in jeopardy — whereas appraisals of past injustice can fuel anger, humiliation, or a sense of moral obligation. Research on historical trauma among Indigenous peoples, on the siege mentality documented in intractable conflicts, and on conspiracy beliefs as adaptations to historical trauma all illustrate how primary appraisals shape the psychological terrain on which later responses unfold.

Secondary appraisal follows: the evaluation of what the group can do about the harm. Here the framework incorporates beliefs about collective power, agency, and efficacy. Groups that perceive themselves as powerless may retreat into defensive victimhood, emphasizing their suffering to claim moral standing they cannot secure through strength. Groups that perceive latent strength may convert victimization appraisals into challenge rather than threat, a shift that studies on historical collective trauma suggest can transform intergroup dynamics. The review highlights findings among Black Americans, Kurdish communities, and other groups whose beliefs about ingroup resilience and resistance — the conviction that ‘we have survived before and can resist again’ — operate as psychological resources rather than wounds. These secondary appraisals determine whether coping efforts take the form of avoidance, such as denial and defensive closure, or approach, such as justice-seeking, collective action, and outreach.

The third phase, coping efforts, is where the framework displays its greatest explanatory reach. The authors distinguish among a wide repertoire of strategies that victimized groups deploy, many of which were previously treated as isolated phenomena. Competitive victimhood — the struggle to establish that one’s own group suffered more than its adversary — emerges as an avoidance-oriented strategy that obstructs forgiveness and reconciliation, as demonstrated in studies of Israeli–Palestinian, Bosnian, and other post-conflict settings. By contrast, inclusive victim consciousness, the belief that one’s own suffering connects the group to other victimized groups rather than separating it from them, functions as an approach-oriented coping effort associated with support for refugees, willingness for intergroup contact, and peace activism. The review also integrates less-studied efforts such as acknowledgment-seeking, the pursuit of recognition from perpetrators and the international community, which experimental and survey research links to improved psychological well-being and greater readiness for compromise.

Critically, the framework treats these beliefs as multidimensional rather than binary. Earlier scholarship often contrasted a single ‘victim mentality’ with its absence, but the review draws on the authors’ own empirical work — including Q-methodology studies across five communities and surveys in Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Northern Ireland, the Korean diaspora, and elsewhere — showing that people simultaneously hold multiple, sometimes contradictory victimization beliefs. A person may believe their group’s suffering was unique and unmatched while also feeling bound to other victims of history. The same historical memory can underwrite exclusive nationalism in one context and cosmopolitan solidarity in another, depending on which appraisals and coping pathways are activated. This complexity, the authors argue, is precisely what one-dimensional models have missed.

The consequences, or coping outcomes, span both individual and societal levels. At the individual level, chronic threat appraisals and avoidance coping are associated with heightened anxiety, depressive symptoms, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, patterns documented among Holocaust survivors’ descendants, Indigenous adolescents, Ukrainian Holodomor families, and refugee populations. Yet the review also catalogues constructive outcomes: posttraumatic growth after collective violence, altruism born of suffering, and radical hope — a culturally grounded orientation toward a better future even in revolting times. At the societal level, the same belief structures predict support for hostile policies such as population transfer and preemptive strikes on one hand, and for forgiveness, reparations, and joint political decision-making on the other. Recent meta-analytic work on collective victimhood beliefs and conflict-related attitudes confirms that these associations are robust across contexts, though their direction depends on which specific beliefs are measured.

The appraisal–coping lens also clarifies why interventions succeed or fail. Programs that reduce competitive victimhood by recategorizing adversaries into a common victim identity, narratives that frame historical trauma inclusively, moral-exemplar interventions highlighting figures who responded to injustice with principled resistance, and reconciliation radio dramas that encourage historical perspective-taking all work, in this framework’s terms, by shifting primary or secondary appraisals and by modeling approach-oriented coping. Conversely, commemorative practices that reinforce exclusive victimhood — such as memorial days that heighten affective polarization — can entrench threat appraisals even while strengthening ingroup cohesion. The framework thus gives practitioners a diagnostic vocabulary: identify which appraisal is dominant, which coping effort is being rewarded, and which outcome the belief structure is likely to produce.

The authors are careful to note the framework’s boundaries and the research agenda it implies. Much of the evidence remains correlational, drawn from self-report surveys in a limited set of conflict regions, and the field still lacks longitudinal designs tracking how appraisals evolve as violence unfolds or subsides. The review also stresses that coping with collective victimization cannot be reduced to individual adaptation: liberation psychology and decolonial scholarship remind researchers that oppression is structural, and that ‘coping’ in an unjust context may legitimately mean resistance rather than adjustment. Future work, the authors suggest, should examine within-group variation — how gender, generation, class, and intersectional identities shape whose victimization beliefs prevail — and should test the framework’s phases experimentally.

What emerges is a picture both sobering and hopeful. Collective victimization is neither a destiny of endless retaliation nor a guaranteed springboard to solidarity; it is a psychological process whose direction depends on appraisals of threat and agency, on the coping efforts communities can imagine and afford, and on the social and political environments that reward some beliefs while silencing others. By providing a common architecture for a fragmented literature, the review equips researchers, policymakers, and peacebuilders to ask a sharper question than ‘does trauma breed violence?’ — namely, which beliefs about victimhood, under which conditions, lead groups to lash out, and which lead them to reach out.

Subject of Research: An appraisal–coping framework explaining how collective victimization beliefs shape destructive and constructive group responses to violence

Article Title: An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences

Article References: Vollhardt, J. R., Jeong, H. Y., Szabó, Z. P., & Elazab, K. (2026). An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Keywords: collective victimization, appraisal-coping framework, intergroup conflict, historical trauma, collective victimhood beliefs, reconciliation, inclusive victim consciousness, competitive victimhood, collective resilience, social psychology, peace psychology, Nature Reviews Psychology