The Social Psychology group regularly organises and hosts scientific conferences, workshops, summer schools, guest lectures and other events.
Each term we invite a range of external speakers to come and give a guest lecture to all the researchers in the Social Psychology group. Please see the timetable below of upcoming seminars.
Further details and links to access Teams are distributed internally.
Dr Jessie SunMoral psychological research has overwhelmingly relied on hypothetical scenarios and lab experiments. As a result, existing research has little to say about how people experience morality in real-world contexts. For example, how often do people notice moral opportunities and face moral tradeoffs in everyday life? To address these questions, I will present findings from two Day Reconstruction Method studies. In Study 1, 377 U.S. participants reported whether each of 12 virtues (e.g., compassion, honesty, loyalty) was relevant, their momentary enactments of the virtues, and perceived tradeoffs between pairs of virtues during episodes from their daily life (12,385 total), across 7 days. In Study 2, 608 participants provided detailed information about one tradeoff episode. Participants perceived an opportunity to express at least one of the 12 virtues 77% of the time. Virtue “tradeoffs” (Study 2; 31.7%) were perceived more frequently than “conflicts” (15.8%; Study 1), and most often involved honesty or courage. Tradeoffs were largely resolved by prioritizing one of the two virtues (53.9% of decisions), compared to making compromises (28.4%), finding a way to show high levels of both virtues (14.2%), or avoiding decisions (3.5%). Together, these results shed light on how people experience and navigate moral opportunities and tradeoffs in everyday life.
Dr Sanaz TalaifarI am an Assistant Professor in Organisational Behaviour in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London. Prior to joining Imperial, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. I received my PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Broadly, I am interested in identity and its intersections with politics and technology. More specifically, my research examines 1) how identity acts as a barrier and bridge to mutual understanding between people in political and other contexts, and 2) how identities shape and are shaped by digital environments. I combine traditional methods (surveys, experiments) with novel methods (smartphone sensing, experience sampling) to study identity in both controlled and naturalistic settings.
Professor Angel GomezI am a Professor at the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain. I am also currently the Director of the Department.
My research is focused on strategies to improve intergroup relations (i.e. recategorization, intergroup contact, extended contact meta-stereotypes), and in those processes involved on such improvement (i.e. self-verification and verification of ingroup identity). My main interest in the last few years is to explain the roots of extreme behaviors and terrorism via identity fusion.
Domantas UndzenasHow do court decisions on controversial immigration policies affect support for hierarchies between groups? I analyse the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on the Rwanda asylum plan and how it affects people’s support for racial hierarchies, measured by social dominance orientation. Utilising the unexpected event during survey design I show that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the illegality of the Rwanda asylum plan increased support for racial and ethnic hierarchies among the British public. The effect is primarily driven by White Britons. The results suggest that declaring the Rwanda plan unconstitutional threatened the British public and made them more in favour of hierarchies between groups, where immigrants are in a subordinate position. This paper is the first to utilise the unexpected event during survey design in the study of political values. The results have important implications for the study of political behaviour, political values and prejudice against immigrants.
The European Association of Social Psychology Summer School brings together graduate students from across Europe (and beyond) for 10 days of immersive learning, guided by experienced social psychologists from both Europe and beyond. It’s not only a chance for students to gain valuable insights and supervision but also a unique opportunity to connect with fellow graduate students from different countries, fostering cross-border collaborations and long-lasting professional networks.
Organised by Jim Everett, the 2025 summer school will be hosted by the School of Psychology at Kent, and aims to integrate classic theories and research in social psychology with innovative areas of inquiry to address the emerging challenges of today’s society. In the first week, students will attend seminars taught by international experts on their thematic workstream of choice, before spending the second week focusing on developing their own group research projects.
Dr Kristof Dhont is currently serving as President of the Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations (PHAIR Society).
The Animal Advocacy Conference is the official general meeting of the PHAIR Society and will be held once every two years.
The goal of the Animal Advocacy Conference is to bring together researchers from different fields in the social and behavioral sciences, and animal activists and advocates from around the world.This conference uniquely bridges the gap between academic researchers and activists/professionals in the field of vegan and animal rights advocacy. It creates a stimulating environment where academics and activists/advocates exchange relevant knowledge, engage in lively debates, share their ideas, and can start collaborations.
This year’s conference kicks off with a public lecture by Peter Singer, described as the world’s most influential living philosopher.
Karen Douglas hosted the CONSPIRACY_FX conference on the consequences of conspiracy theories, funded by the ERC. More than 70 guests were welcomed to the University of Kent, including the leading researchers in the field. The conference included a series of presentations, blitz talks and posters on a wide variety of topics such as political action, war, vaccination, and the climate. Contributors represented a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, sociology, and political science, which added to the richness of the discussions.
Social identity theory and related topics have been an area of interest for social psychology and political psychology for decades. The impact of group membership and our social identities on our social and political behaviors can not be understated. Current events, increased political polarization, and intergroup conflict in some areas of the world, reminds us of the importance of understanding the underlying mechanisms of social identity. Recent research on cross-categorization and social identity complexity hints at how social identity research can help to overcome polarization and conflict based on group memberships. This meeting on social identity was designed to bring social identity researchers and theorists together to examine the current state of social identity research, and to foster collaborations and future work in the field.
This single day workshop, organised by Jim Everett, brought together researchers from various disciplines including psychology, philosophy, and computer science to share research and provoke discussions surrounding the moral psychology of artificial intelligence. Keynote speakers included Jean-Francois Bonnefon, John Danaher, Chiara Longoni, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
Professor Antonia Hamilton is a world-leading scientist in the study of human social interaction at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Face-to-face interaction is central to our communication and social relationships but traditional cognitive research has not explored the mechanisms that support this behaviour. This talk will examine how and why we should study face-to-face interaction. I will share examples of how behaviour changes as we move from solo to interactive contexts in terms of eye gaze, imitation and brain activity patterns. I will describe how new methods allow us to capture aspects of natural interactions and the type of theories we may need to make sense of these rich dynamic datasets.
Antecedents of science rejectionWhat makes people distrust science? Recent work on the antecedents of science rejection points to its heterogeneous nature. I will first discuss recent work that investigates science rejection across countries. Results show that while some countries stand out as generally high or low in rejection of science, predictors of science rejection are relatively similar across countries. One notable effect was consistent across countries though stronger in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) nations: General trust in science was predicted by spirituality, suggesting that it, more than religiosity, may be the ‘enemy’ of science acceptance. Other findings were also in line with previous work, which means that it is now possible – for the more contentious and most-often studied domains of science – to predict who is skeptical about what science. However, the problem with this body of work is the limited insight into the psychology behind this science rejection, as well as the unavailability of clear routes towards improved science attitudes. I will address these issues by discussing two avenues of research that aim to move our understanding of the psychology of science rejection forward. The first avenue focuses on spiritual science rejection specifically, offering tentative insight into what might underlie this robust relationship. The second line of work focuses on a new model for understanding science rejection across science domains: psychological distance to science. I will present correlational and experimental evidence for this model.
Shame Sensitive Professional Practice: Why We Need to Understand Shame and its EffectsShame is a strong driver of decision-making and behaviour, and as a result is a significant force to consider in professional practice and when delivering human services such as social care, policing and healthcare. These are professions where power imbalances, vulnerability and the possibility of shameful exposure are often inherent to interactions between clients/patients/service users and the professionals and practitioners that are trained to help them. In addition, understanding shame and its effects is central to understanding post-trauma states and achieving trauma-informed practice, a paradigm which is increasingly adopted in policing and other services to facilitate more empathic, effective and sensitive care. However, a consideration of shame, along with its impacts and effects, is rarely considered when developing principles and policies for practice within human services. Nor is an understanding of shame and its effects a part of professional training. The aim of the presentation is to introduce the idea of “shame competence” and to demonstrate why practitioners and professionals need to understand shame and its effects
Mundane Explanations for Morality, Belief, and SocialityIt is often tempting to explain our deeply-held beliefs and values using profound explanations, such as striving for meaning. Yet much of what seems transcendent also helps people attain mundane goals, such as starting families or gaining status. Drawing on experiments, cross-cultural surveys, and recent theoretical perspectives, I will review research suggesting that people’s goals and beliefs, especially about family and sexuality, can be an important influence on many moral judgments, religious beliefs, and social perceptions.
Persons in Contexts: Idiographic Psychological DynamicsPsychology is fundamentally a study of persons, including their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as the contexts and social structures in which they are embedded. Yet, the bulk of psychological research focuses on aggregated patterns across people, which obfuscates the complex dynamics through which an individual life unfolds. In this talk, I highlight a re-emerging psychology based in dynamic systems theory that emphasizes the individual and uniqueness (i.e. idiographics) as well as the group and commonality (I .e. nomothetics). First, I discuss ongoing work investigating a person as a dynamic system of shared and unique social, cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and contextual factors that unfold over time. Second, I link short-term dynamics with long-term change, demonstrating how to bridge idiographic and nomothetic approaches. Third, I discuss the applied relevance of idiographic approaches for behavioral targeting and intervention tailoring. I conclude by summarizing this work in the broader context of psychology.
