Western societies are divided over whether public expressions of Islam should be permitted in urban spaces. Some argue such displays prompt withdrawal among Muslim immigrants and undermine their sense of belonging, yet rigorous empirical testing remains limited. Given this empirical gap, this study provides a causal test of the effect of in situ exposure to embedded Islamic symbols on Muslim immigrants’ place-based integration. We conceptualize place integration as a proximal, cue-driven person–environment process, reflected in approach-oriented behavior and attitudinal–perceptual attachment to place. We then evaluate the effect of public Islam using naturalistic field experiments and original surveys with Muslim immigrants in Paris and London. Using a purpose-built augmented reality mobile app, our experiments tracked participants’ movement along identical urban routes, randomly assigning exposure to either Islamic symbols (treatment) or non-religious cues (control) (NParis = 151, NLondon = 147). GPS-based behavioral data comprising walking pace, acceleration and brief remaining near the location, show that exposure to Islamic symbols increased approach-oriented behavior (dParis = 0.51, dLondon = 0.63, P < 0.05), accompanied by a parallel increase in self-reported place attachment. Corroborating survey evidence (NParis = 403, NLondon = 400) further indicates that everyday visibility of Islamic symbols in one’s neighborhood is positively associated with place attachment. The patterns hold in both Paris and London, despite their contrasting approaches to religious visibility, indicating that the effect extends beyond a single policy context. These findings have implications for the governance of religious diversity in urban public spaces in the context of immigration.

How do people form opinions in high-stakes situations, prevalent in times of conflict and crisis? We propose that personal values play a crucial role in shaping opinions and provide empirical evidence and novel insights about the process involved. We expected values to predict opinions regarding negotiations with armed groups to free hostages. Five Israeli samples (N = 7,248; four preregistered, one longitudinal) participated during the Hamas–Israel war, as hostage deal negotiations dominated public discourse. Universalism values predicted deal support, while power and tradition values predicted opposition. Values predicted opinions independently of demographics and empathy, with universalism significant even beyond political ideology. Opinion certainty was higher when values fit the opinion (e.g., high universalism coupled with support) than when they did not. A longitudinal design supported values’ role in several ways. First, values measured before the first deal predicted opinions a year later. Second, low value coherence predicted change in opinion over time. Third, values predicted shifts in opinion over time. Finally, the fit between values and opinion predicted opinion stability through increased certainty. Although limited to a single sociopolitical context and lacking Palestinian perspectives, findings offer strong evidence that personal values may shape moral judgment under uncertainty and help individuals navigate evolving, emotionally charged dilemmas. The study offers new contributions by assessing values in relation to high-stakes (not hypothetical) dilemmas, tracking opinion change over a moving target (an evolving hostage deal), and demonstrating how value–opinion fit predicts opinion certainty and consequentially long-term stability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)

On 7 October 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and took 251 hostages into Gaza, resulting in a drawn-out war and a hostage crisis that involved complex life-and-death related dilemmas. Using longitudinal data collected from a representative sample of Israeli Jews across two years (Total N = 902), we examined cognitive and emotional bases for how people formed opinions about the hostage crisis. Participants rated the importance of releasing hostages, how connected they felt to the hostages’ families and their opinions about three concrete Hostage Deals (HDs). Almost all participants expressed that releasing hostages (88.6%) was highly important, a significant minority felt very connected to hostages’ families across waves (34.9–40.4%) and most participants supported the HDs, with increased support over time (56.8–72.0%). Attitudes towards releasing hostages predicted HD support a year later and beyond. Political orientation predicted attitudes towards releasing hostages and HD opinions across time. Feeling connected to hostages’ families predicted HD support independently of politics-related variables. Although definitive causal conclusions cannot be made, findings suggest people may rely simultaneously on both cognitive and emotional processes when forming opinions about decisions involving complex tradeoffs with life-and-death implications.

Religious belief commonly relates to prosocial behavior, yet studies suggest that religious individuals tend to limit their prosociality to ingroup members. In this study, we conducted a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to investigate further religious prosociality and ingroup favoritism in a real-world setting. Our results support the association between religiosity and prosociality, showing that religious individuals (compared to secular individuals) were likelier to donate and display hospitality toward fundraisers. However, we also found evidence of ingroup bias by focusing on the role of religiosity level as a boundary of the religious ingroup among co-religionists. Religious people were more inclined to donate to religious fundraisers than secular fundraisers, despite a shared religious affiliation with both. Furthermore, we explored the implications of religious diversity residential context on this nuanced ingroup bias and suggest that the religious community structure alone may not be sufficient to explain the nuances of religious prosocial behavior.

Current studies of citizens’ coping behaviors in public encounters lack a direct examination of what citizens say and how they say it. Moreover, despite the ubiquity of citizens’ written communications with the state, such interactions are seldom studied. This article contributes a relational approach to studies of citizens’ coping behaviors by developing a taxonomy and detailed operationalization of citizens’ communication styles in written public encounters. This taxonomy is based on an abductive content analysis of over 1,000 citizen web contacts to an Israeli welfare agency, mostly during coronavirus disease 2019. We show that citizens’ written communications differ in their inclination to espouse demanding, pleading, civil, or neutral styles. Additionally, we tentatively show that citizens’ subjective experiences of administrative burdens and trust in government are correlated with the variation in their communication styles. The taxonomy, its operationalization, and preliminary findings open up new avenues for studying citizens’ coping behaviors in written encounters.

How do political activists’ protest strategies affect intergroup violence around friction points? Activists presume that their presence around checkpoints will protect the controlled population from humiliation and prevent the dominant force from engaging in violent or abusive behavior. However, depending on the protest strategy chosen, their presence may backfire and engender violence. We conducted a comprehensive content analysis of YouTube video clips featuring political activists at checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank over a 15-year period (2003–2018, n = 50, overall duration of 210 min) and examined how attributes of the protest (violent or nonviolent) and attributes of the activists (religious identity) influence the (apparent) emotions and behavior of the soldiers and Palestinians present. Results revealed that violent demonstrations by activists are associated with aggression and signs of anger among Israeli soldiers and with aggression (though at lower levels) and signs of humiliation among Palestinian civilians. The findings suggest that, despite the hope of political activists that their presence at checkpoints will have a positive effect on the treatment of Palestinian civilians, in practice, their presence may backfire if they employ a violent protest strategy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Cultural landscapes can contribute to positive environmental appraisals. However, previous studies focused on exposure to ingroup culture. Referring the debate in Europe on Muslim symbols in the public sphere, this study examines the effect of exposure to outgroup cultural cues on environmental appraisals. We compare environmental appraisals of participants from France, Germany, and the Netherlands after a simulated walk in an outgroup (Muslim) cultural landscape or a religiously-neutral environment. The effect of the Muslim setting was contingent on intolerance, with tolerant individuals reporting more positive environmental appraisals in the Muslim environment. However, this effect reversed as intolerance increased, and more intolerant individuals perceived the Muslim environment more negatively than the control. These findings offer an alternative view to the idea that the visibility of Muslim symbols in the public space has negative effects. Instead, we reveal a nuanced interplay between the urban environment, sociopolitical context and individual-level differences.

Studies of electoral geography have traditionally examined the impact of spatial context on vote choice at the neighborhood or larger geographical level, overlooking potential effects of the immediate physical environment in the polling station. Observations of actual polling stations located in schools in Israel revealed a strong presence of nationalist and religious content in and around voting booths, in the form of naïve décor such as murals and children’s drawings (Study 1). In three experimental studies (Studies 2–4), we examine the effect on voters of such seemingly apolitical cues. The experimental studies were conducted in the days prior to Israeli general elections for the 21st and 22nd Knesset. Using a virtual-reality interface based on real-life content in actual polling stations (Study 2, student sample) and simulated environments (Studies 3 and 4, representative samples of Jewish Israeli voters), the three experiments document an effect of naïve nationalist décor on simulated voting, particularly for left-wing less-nationalist voters. In Study 5, based on actual voting in the 22nd Knesset, we capitalize on the random allocation of voters to polling stations in schools and find a correlation between the content displayed around polling places and voting patterns among distinctively left-wing populations. Investigating the influence of the encounter with the immediate environment at a resolution of meters and seconds exposes the potential impact of the (ultra-)micro temporo-spatial scale on decision-making and enriches theoretical discussions on the multiscalarity of contexts in electoral geography analyses.

This chapter shows the immense progress made in the last decade in the study of morality in public opinion and discusses some of the complexities of the morality–politics nexus. It starts by reviewing the plethora of theoretical definitions for morality in politics, and then probes how morality might serve as the basis of public opinion by examining how it translates into political attitudes. Next, the chapter reviews the main findings in this burgeoning literature. It describes the links between moral attitudes and ideology and, in particular, possible ideological asymmetry in moral thinking, and moves to review the role of morality as a source of elite rhetoric, a vehicle for political activism, a driver of extremism and polarization, and a key dimension in voter evaluations of politicians. This is followed by a discussion of measurement, and finally concludes with thoughts about the future of the field.

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the social consequences of polarization-driven behaviors by conceptualizing them as a moral threat to the self. Our argument employs systemist graphics, illustrating key connections and patterns from two distinct scientific works. First, an analysis of polarization-driven behavior, which reveals Americans’ willingness to trade democratic values for partisan goals. Second, research on moral disengagement strategies, revealing the role of resentment as a coping mechanism in armed conflicts. We offer a synthesis analysis between these two studies and uncover a twofold role of morality in polarization: as a factor in forming partisan animosity and a catalyst in its perpetuation and intensification. We further highlight the role of outgroup hate, rather than ingroup love, in driving negative actions resulting from polarization, and the challenge of reconciling morally-driven conflicts. Our framework sheds new light on the complex interplay between morality and conflicts, with implications for social cohesion, erosion of moral values, and democratic backsliding.