The double insult: explaining gender differences in the psychological consequences of war

Although women have been shown to be at higher mental health risk following the experience of extreme events in war, this phenomenon is not fully understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of gender norms in determining the interpretation of events and the degree of social support given to victims. Thirty-eight survivors from the Kosovo conflict in 1999 were interviewed and data was analyzed using thematic and content analysis. The findings suggest that events which are seen as affirming gender norms (such as men who were injured in fighting the enemy) evoke pride in the victim and support from the community whereas events that are seen as undermining gender norms (such as women who are sexually assaulted) evoke shame in the victim and rejection by the community. Women, we suggest, are psychologically vulnerable both because they are more likely than men to experience identity undermining events and also because the consequences of such events are more severe for women than men

Impresarios of identity: How the leaders of Czechoslovakia's ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ enabled effective collective action in a context of repression

This paper presents an analysis of identity leadership (Haslam et al., The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power, Routledge, 2020) in the 1988 ‘Candlelight Demonstration’ in Bratislava which was a precursor to the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The analysis is based on interviews with the five remaining leaders of the demonstration and addresses three core issues. First, how leaders use performative means (identity impresarioship) as well as limited rhetorical means (identity entrepreneurship) to assemble protestors and create a sense of shared identity amongst them. Second, how these strategies of mobilization are linked to the highly repressive context in which the demonstration took place. Third, we analyse the extent to which these strategies are rooted in a psychological understanding of the processes of mobilization. We conclude by addressing the implications for our general understanding of leadership and the mobilization of collective action and the need for more research into these processes under conditions of repression

A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued

Perception, Action and the Social Dynamics of the Variable Self

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Contemporary understanding of riots: classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach

This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of ‘mass society’ and that ‘classical’ crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offering the ruling elites a perceived opportunity to control it. We contend that classical theory misrepresents crowd psychology and survives in contemporary understanding because it is ideological. We conclude by discussing how classical theory has been supplanted in academic contexts by an identity-based crowd psychology that restores the meaning to crowd action, replaces it in its social context and in so doing transforms theoretical understanding of ‘riots’ and the nature of the self

Open borders, closed minds: the discursive construction of national identity in North Cyprus

The article investigates the discursive construction of a Turkish Cypriot national identity by the newspapers in North Cyprus. It questions the representation and reconstruction processes of national identity within the press and examines the various practices employed to mobilize readers around certain national imaginings. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the article analyses news reports of the opening of border crossings in Cyprus in 2003, based on their content, the strategies used in the production of national identity and the linguistic means employed in the process. In this way, the nationalist tendencies embedded in news discourses, as well as discriminatory and exclusive practices, are sought out

Identity leadership in a crisis : a 5R framework for learning from responses to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest global crisis of our lifetimes, and leadership has been critical to societies' capacity to deal with it. Here effective leadership has brought people together, provided a clear perspective on what is happening and what response is needed, and mobilized the population to act in the most effective ways to bring the pandemic under control. Informed by a model of identity leadership (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2020), this review argues that leaders? ability to do these things is grounded in their ability to represent and advance the shared interests of group members and to create and embed a sense of shared social identity among them (a sense of "us-ness"). For leaders, then, this sense of us-ness is the key resource that they need to marshal in order to harness the support and energy of citizens. The review discusses examples of the successes and failures of different leaders during the pandemic and organizes these around five policy priorities related to the 5Rs of identity leadership: readying, reflecting, representing, realizing, and reinforcing. These priorities and associated lessons are relevant not only to the management of COVID-19 but to crisis management and leadership more generally.PostprintPeer reviewe

Engaged followership and toxic science : exploring the effect of prototypicality on willingness to follow harmful experimental instructions

Funding: This research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council grant (ES/L003104/1), a Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (FL110100199), from funding received from the School of Management at the University of St Andrews.Drawing on the ‘engaged followership’ reinterpretation of Milgram’s work on obedience, four studies (three of which were pre-registered) examine the extent to which people’s willingness to follow an experimenter’s instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either ‘hard’ (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or ‘soft’ (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science’s importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study as to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to the toxic instructions of an authority are discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe