Suchergebnisse

Seeking help from an outgroup can be difficult, especially when the outgroup is known to stereotype the ingroup negatively and the potential recipient cares strongly about its social image. However, we ask whether even highly identified ingroup members may seek help from a judgmental outgroup if doing so allows them to disconfirm the outgroup's negative stereotype of the ingroup. We presented participants with one of two negative outgroup stereotypes of their ingroup. One could be disconfirmed through seeking help, the other could not. Study 1 ( n = 43) showed group members were aware of the strategic implications of seeking help for disconfirming these stereotypes. Study 2 ( n = 43) showed high identifiers acted on such strategic knowledge by seeking more help from the outgroup when help-seeking could disconfirm a negative stereotype of their group (than when it could not). Implications for the seeking and acceptance of help are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented and truly global social threat in recent human history. Understanding the impacts of the pandemic on our communities, as well as investigating and fostering effective responses, represents a genuinely interdisciplinary challenge, which deeply involves psychology. Social and community psychologists are working to understand the psychological processes characterising individual, familial, institutional, and communities' reactions to the pandemic worldwide. The present special issue consists of 15 articles from three continents (Europe, North and South America, and Asia) on the COVID-19 pandemic, how it is affecting various communities, and how communities are coping with the various local and societal dilemmas stemming from this dramatic health event. The articles make use of different methodologies, including correlational and longitudinal quantitative examinations as well as qualitative analyses. The studies consider a high number of participants (approximately 14,000) across a wide range of participant types, including older adults, women victims of violence, politicians, community samples, and representative samples. We hope that the special issue can help academics and practitioners to understand the phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic and how to foster active and supportive responses from individuals and communities at all levels, both societally and globally.

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the threats to health posed by loneliness. One of the main strategies that has been recommended to address this is social prescribing (SP). This typically involves general practitioners (GPs) and other health practitioners directing clients who are experiencing loneliness and related conditions to take part in social activities—typically in recreational and community contexts. However, evidence for the effectiveness of SP is mixed—leading some to suggest that enthusiasm for it might be misplaced. In this review, we argue that a core problem with most existing approaches to SP is that they lack a strong theoretical base. This has been a barrier to (a) understanding when SP will work and why, (b) designing optimally effective SP programmes, and (c) developing practitioner skills and appropriate infrastructure to support them. As a corrective to this state of affairs, this review outlines a three-tier social identity framework for SP and five associated hypotheses. These hypotheses predict that SP will be more effective when (a) clients join groups and (b) these groups are ones with which they identify, and when SP is supported by (c) social-identity-enhancing social infrastructure, (d) a social-identity-based therapeutic alliance, and (e) identity leadership that builds and shapes this alliance as well as clients' identification with prescribed groups. This framework is supported by a range of evidence and provides an agenda for much-needed future research and practice.