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Social Psychology of Intergroup Hostility and Violence: Prejudice, Norms, Misrecognition, and Populism ‐ Symposium

Mete Sefa Uysal, University of Jena

The main aim of this symposia is to raise crucial questions regarding intergroup hostility and violence while discussing social-psychological antecedents of political violence such as prejudice, social norms, misrecognition, and right-wing populism. The first talk will be given by Clemens Lindner, which highlights the fundamental attribution error in prejudice research shared by many psychologists. This fundamental attribution error leads psychology research to use personality-based rather than group-based explanations for prejudice. In two studies, with broader ranges of prejudice targets (i.e., stimulus sampling), they showed that right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation can be both negatively and positively related to prejudice. The second talk, given by Pascal Gelfort, moves this discussion towards the social norm literature. He will discuss prejudice as linked to shared social norms in line with the results of two studies that assessed norms and prejudice with a broad range of prejudice targets. After the first two talks focused on prejudice, we will direct our scope towards right-wing populism and discuss its antecedents and outcomes in terms of aggression and political violence. The third talk will be given by Mete Sefa Uysal and will discuss how right-wing populist beliefs lead to support for hate crimes in Germany through national pride and moral justification of political violence, by using German General Social Survey 2018 data. After the discussion on the negative outcomes of right-wing populism, Julia Elad-Strenger and Thomas Kessler will give the last talk and argue that citizens' perception of being misrecognized by elites (e.g., politicians) leads to support for right-wing populism. We hope that this symposium will advance our knowledge of the interrelation between old core concepts of social psychology such as prejudice and social norms with relatively new social problems of our society such as right-wing populism and extremism.

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