Dr Kristof Dhont

About

Kristof Dhont, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies (Research) in the School of Psychology at the University of Kent. He is the founder and director of SHARKLab, dedicated to the study human intergroup and human-animal relations. He currently serves as Associate Editor for the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (GPIR) and as Consulting Editor for the European Journal of Personality (EJP).

Research interests

Kristof's interests include the situational and personality factors that drive and sustain intergroup biases such as ethnic and gender-based prejudice as well as speciesism, with a special interest in social-ideological variables (e.g. social dominance orientation and authoritarianism) and identity-based processes.

He investigates the factors shaping people's perceptions and thinking about animals, the complexities and paradoxes in human-animal relations, and the moral psychology of eating and exploiting animals. Some of the key questions concern:

How do people perceive and think about animals as a social outgroup (or multiple outgroups)?
Why do people love and care about animals, yet also eat and exploit them?
How can prejudice towards human and non-human animals be reduced, for instance through positive intergroup contact and increasing empathy?
What are the implications of our attitudes and behaviors toward animals for human intergroup relations?

He also investigates the impact of contextual factors such as societal intergroup norms and threat on ideology and intergroup attitudes and the psychological factors that motivate people to support social change.

To see more of Kristof's publications, please visit: https://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/people/220/dhont-kristof

Teaching

MSc:
SP860 Political Psychology; Co-lecturer
SP844 Advanced Topics in Group Processes; Module Convenor and Co-lecturer
SP813 Advanced Topics in Intergroup Relations; Co-lecturer

BSc:
SP529 Personality; 2nd Year Undergraduate Honours level;
Module Convenor and Lecturer
SP302 Introduction to Social Psychology
Co-lecturer
SP300 Psychology Statistics and Practical
Co-lecturer and Experimental Demonstrator

Supervision

Alina Salmen
Linus Peitz
Victoria Krings
Arti Makwana

Professional

Editorial work

2015 – present. Associate editor of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (GPIR)
2016 - present. Consulting editor of the European Journal of Personality (EJP)
2014 – 2017. Associate editor of Psychologica Belgica
Editor of Special Issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.
Dhont, Hodson, Loughnan, & Amiot (2019). (De)Valuing Animals:
Intergroup Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations

Professional affiliations:

Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)
Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)
International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP)