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AbstractPolitical psychology has greatly benefited from work that together addresses the enormous variety of political problems faced by people around the world, including those that are universal (e.g., how one gains access to basic needs, how power should be governed) and problems that confront people in particular situations (e.g., transitions of governmental forms, war, group exclusion, rapid economic change, decolonization, external intervention, national dominance). Adopting multiple standpoints and research agendas is necessary for us collectively to make our work useful to publics and to further the work each of us does. Another strength of our discipline is to employ the assumptions of multiple disciplines and of a variety of research methods. I will illustrate these points with research examples from several ISPP members and discuss ways that those in our discipline try to confront the difficulties that lack of commonality in theory, standpoint, methods, and epistemological assumptions can pose. Finally, I will summarize some of the work that various ISPP members have done to promote the development of political psychology and our society this year and invite further suggestions and contributions from members in how we can serve one another.

This volume focuses on two questions: why do people from one social group oppress and discriminate against people from other groups? and why is this oppression so mind numbingly difficult to eliminate? The answers to these questions are framed using the conceptual framework of social dominance theory. Social dominance theory argues that the major forms of intergroup conflict, such as racism, classism and patriarchy, are all basically derived from the basic human predisposition to form and maintain hierarchical and group-based systems of social organization. In essence, social dominance theory presumes that, beneath major and sometimes profound difference between different human societies, there is also a basic grammar of social power shared by all societies in common. We use social dominance theory in an attempt to identify the elements of this grammar and to understand how these elements interact and reinforce each other to produce and maintain group-based social hierarchy

We experimentally investigated psychological responses of bystanders to violations of moral codes to find out why divinity violations may be more effective for gaining victimhood status than autonomy violations in real-world intergroup conflicts. In particular, we considered how anger versus disgust responses are differentially invoked by violations of autonomy versus divinity ethics. Two experiments compared autonomy versus divinity violations in interaction with two other parameters known to produce different effects: level of harm (Experiment 1) and differential intergroup power (Experiment 2). Overall, we found support for the proposed dissociation in anger versus disgust responses to autonomy versus divinity violations in a way that the anger responses to autonomy violations were amplified but disgust responses to divinity violations were not affected when the moral violation was more harmful and the perpetrator was more powerful than the victim. We discuss the implications of the cognitive processes involved in considering autonomy versus divinity violations, and the functionality for parties to intergroup conflict of accusing the opponent of divinity violations.

We argue that political psychology would benefit from an ecological approach to complement other approaches. After detailing what adopting an ecological approach would entail, we provide examples of how this can enrich political psychological questions. We exemplify this by using the notion of repeated assemblies (Caporael, ) to illustrate several political psychological problem‐concepts. We then detail an ecological approach to understanding political psychology through the ecological and dynamic features of two organizing principles, human power and need, called power basis theory (Pratto, ). This provides a means to understand the behavior of individuals and collectives, as well as a means to understand how political ecologies at any level serve or fail to serve ecologies at either level. We suggest that ecological theories such as power basis enable political psychology to ask ambitious and novel questions that complement the state of the field today.

The current study aimed to investigate value projection between Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Swiss as a function of their group's stance toward the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. Drawing on image theory, we assumed that images – operationalized by value projection – would be a function not just of features of the target group, but of the rater group's relationship with the target group. Value projection can be seen as an indicator of (de)humanization as values represent goals and desirable behaviors of a person. We therefore expected higher projection to ally than to enemy groups, whereas we expected no difference in projection to out‐groups with neutral relations. Results show that allies did indeed project Security and Power to a higher degree to each other than to enemies, and enemies showed no, or even negative, projection onto each other. The ally of the enemy (Americans) was projected less negatively by Palestinians than vice versa, pointing to the higher complexity of third‐party images as opposed to the more classical ally and enemy images. As expected, Swiss students showed almost no difference in projection to the different out‐groups. These results confirm that the relationship between groups (e.g., alliance, enmity) rather than a consensual view of particular nations determines images.