Vivienne Badaan

To investigate ideological symmetries and asymmetries in the expression of online prejudice, we used machine-learning methods to estimate the prevalence of extreme hostility in a large dataset of Twitter messages harvested in 2016. We analyzed language contained in 730,000 tweets on the following dimensions of bias: (1) threat and intimidation, (2) obscenity and vulgarity, (3) name-calling and humiliation, (4) hatred and/or racial, ethnic, or religious slurs, (5) stereotypical generalizations, and (6) negative prejudice. Results revealed that conservative social media users were significantly more likely than liberals to use language that involved threat, intimidation, name-calling, humiliation, stereotyping, and negative prejudice. Conservatives were also slightly more likely than liberals to use hateful language, but liberals were slightly more likely than conservatives to use obscenities. These findings are broadly consistent with the view that liberal values of equality and democratic tolerance contribute to ideological asymmetries in the expression of online prejudice, and they are inconsistent with the view that liberals and conservatives are equally prejudiced.

This article provides the first empirical evidence of the theoretical model by Badaan et al. (2020) that proposes social psychological mechanisms whereby utopian thinking, which activates the social imagination, could enhance collective action intentions geared toward progressive social change. We anticipated that imagining better societies via utopian thinking would (a) increase social hope, (b) promote an abstract mindset that bridges psychological distance between the status quo in the present and the imagined, better future, (c) attenuate system justification motives, and (d) enhance social change-oriented collective action intentions. Using a structural equation modeling approach, our study provides preliminary support for some postulates of the theoretical model, paving the way for future research to further disentangle the psychological mechanisms by which utopian thinking influences collective action geared toward social change.

In this paper, we tackle three central questions: (1) How is cultural sensitivity currently shaping development agendas? (2) How can collaborations between development agencies and (cross-) cultural psychologists ensure that development priorities are culturally sensitive and bottom-up, rather than culturally universal and top-down? And finally, (3) How can utopian thinking be used as a bottom-up research device to tap into the content of the social imaginary of people across cultures and contexts in a way that can inform and guide development paradigms? We review relevant literatures and research from development agencies, cultural, and cross-cultural psychology, highlight advancements in devising culturally sensitive development goals, and advocate for a bottom-up approach to prioritizing needs and goals of citizens across different cultures. To that end, we propose that utopian thinking could be leveraged as a culturally sensitive research tool that could illuminate culturally specific development needs and goals that have been left untapped by contemporary development approaches. We conclude by reiterating the importance of leveraging knowledge, research methods, and expertise from cultural and cross-cultural psychology to reach the ultimate development goal—the improvement of the human condition in a sustainable, equitable manner.

We use an experiment across the Arab Twittersphere and a nationally representative survey experiment in Lebanon to evaluate what types of counter-speech interventions are most effective in reducing sectarian hate speech online. We explore whether and to what extent messages priming common national identity or common religious identity, with and without elite endorsements, decrease the use of hostile anti-outgroup language. We find that elite-endorsed messages that prime common religious identity are the most consistently effective in reducing the spread of sectarian hate speech. Our results provide suggestive evidence that religious elites may play an important role as social referents—alerting individuals to social norms of acceptable behavior. By randomly assigning counter-speech treatments to actual producers of online hate speech and experimentally evaluating the effectiveness of these messages on a representative sample of citizens that might be incidentally exposed to such language, this work offers insights for researchers and policymakers on avenues for combating harmful rhetoric on and offline.

We present an integrative theoretical model that specifies social psychological mechanisms by which utopian thinking, which activates the social imagination, may enhance collective action intentions oriented toward social change and human progress. The model synthesizes complementary insights from interdisciplinary research programs on utopianism, hope, construal level, and system justification to identify mechanisms by which imagining better societies: (a) increases social hope, (b) yields an abstract mindset that bridges the psychological distance between the status quo (“here and now”) and a better possible future, (c) decreases system justification motivation, and (d) promotes social justice‐oriented forms of collective action.