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.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of decentralizing tourists by promoting alternative local-guided tours. Results from a discrete choice experiment among young travellers indicate that while culinary tours are preferred over central attractions, overall, young visitors demonstrated a strong tendency to visit the main attractions. Furthermore, tours labelled as sustainable were perceived as less attractive. The study implies that inter-city dispersal strategies that rely on ‘soft interventions’ may only be effective among certain individuals and are unlikely to lead to substantial changes in tourist behaviour. For dispersal strategies to be effective, local authorities should consider developing comprehensive tourism attractions and amenities.

The psychological literature highlights the dominance of morality in forming social judgments. However, in the political field, recent electoral victories by politicians involved in immoral behavior have shown that immorality does not end careers. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to explain scandalous politicians’ electoral success. In three experiments using both fictional and real politicians in various political settings, we show the effectiveness of a strategy emphasizing different image dimensions in mitigating the negative effects of a scandal. We find that scandal-hit candidates can effectively improve their image by shifting voters’ focus to any image dimension undamaged by scandal, including competence, warmth (studies 1–2), and even morality in undamaged moral foundations (studies 2–3), demonstrating that voters rely on a multi-dimensional model of moral image in appraising politicians. This suggests that politicians who morally transgress can repair their image and avoid accountability using positive messages—as long as they do not scratch the moral itch.

We review the role of religion in the integration of immigrants. Majority groups’ religion can exert both a positive and negative effect on tolerance and acceptance of immigrants, depending on the dimension of religiosity and depending on whether immigrants do or do not share the same religious affiliation. Immigrants’ religion can also exert both a positive and negative effect on the their integration, by providing a social network and a system of meaning but also potentially facilitating extremism, depending on value conflicts with the majority group and acceptance by the majority group. We conclude by highlighting avenues for future research, including the study of manifestations of religion in the public sphere.

Exploiting rare access to doctors’ real-world judgments of incapacity benefits applications to an Israeli governmental program (2015–17), we examine the prevalence and underlying mechanisms of discrimination against Muslims versus Jews. To mitigate confounding explanations for unequal treatment, we restrict the analysis to claimants whose applications passed a strict medical-disability threshold so that their medical condition was undisputed. Theoretically, we offer a comprehensive theoretical framework for possible micro-mechanisms underlying bureaucratic discrimination of minorities, the decision-environment conditions that instigate them, and observational implications for their decoding. Findings indicate that despite organizational commitment to equality Jewish doctors were more likely to reject applications by Muslims and to recommend partial compensation for Jews. We find no differences with regard to full compensation. Further, we empirically illustrate how our proposed theoretical framework can be employed to analyze which micro-mechanism is most likely to underlie discrimination and to empirically decipher among alternative explanations, demonstrating that bureaucratic discrimination, in this case, is best explained by implicit prejudice triggered under conditions of complexity and ambiguity that undermined doctors’ systematic processing of information.