SGM Talk: Lecture series of the Social Groups and Media Research Workshop

SGM Talk: Lecture series of the Social Groups and Media Research Workshop
22/09

22. September 2022. 15:00

09/22

2022. September 22. 15:00 -


The SGM talk will be about the group identity and collective action effects of computer-mediated attitude sharing. This topic will be presented by the speaker, Caoimhe O'Reilly, from the University of Limerick, Ireland.
 

Date and time of the event: September 22, 2022, 3 p.m

Location: ELTE PPK Institute of Psychology (IZU), room 206

Speaker: Caoimhe O'Reilly (University of Limerick)

The summary of the presentation: 

The online social context is increasingly important, and we have much to learn about the  psychological consequences of online communication. Online, attitude sharing is ubiquitous, and attitudes are often the only available categorization cues informing group identification. Research indicates that online communication has many offline consequences e.g., precipitating protests, extremism, and polarization. We also know that, in the offline context, group identification revolving around shared attitudes is special due to its association with collective action. We propose that computer-mediated attitude-based communication may be key for fostering attitude-based identification and that such identification can influence activism as well as attitude polarization.

 Across seven interactive preregistered experiments (data and analytic code freely available), we test these assumptions. For three of these studies we focus on a pressing social context: the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022). As predicted, we find that online attitude expression has psychological consequences; shared attitudes can catalyse group identification. We find that some attitude types are more identity and behaviourally-relevant than others. Shared attitude combinations are particularly important for strong identification and expression of attitude combinations has collective action consequences. We also find that there is a dynamic relationship between attitudes and identification, that attitudes both shape and are shaped by identification. We find that group identification formed as a result of expressing and observing attitudes online has polarization consequences. These studies allow us to shed important light on group formation in the online context and provide the potential to inform online collective action interventions.

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