Hong, Y., Chan, H.-W., & Chiu, C. P.-Y. (2025). Understanding social divides in the Hong Kong 2019 unrest: A combination of person- and variable-centred approaches. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.70001

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• This research combined person- and variable-centred approaches to examine whether (a) core values, (b) perceptions of the political system's legitimacy and (c) attitudes towards Hong Kong–Mainland China integration underlie the Yellow versus Blue politicized collective identities that emerged during the Hong Kong 2019 social unrest. Data were gathered from a representative sample of 2003 Hong Kong residents through a telephone survey. Latent profile analysis of elements (a–c) identified four distinct latent classes that aligned with the Yellow–Blue identities. Membership in these classes predicted support for collective actions that challenged (e.g., protests against the government) versus defended the authority, and the associated solutions to mitigate the social schism. The person-centred approach also detected attributes (including political affiliation, Chinese identification, age and education level) that differentiated the four latent classes. Our approach can be adapted to identify elements that may characterize politicized identity groups in other social movements.

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Kossowska, M., Chan, H.-W., Hong, Y. Y., & Szumowska, E. (2025). Longitudinal effects of helping war refugees on intergroup threat and fear of war: The role of perceived helping functionality. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 28(3), 648-672. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302241297927

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• This study investigates the longitudinal effects of aiding war refugees on perceptions of intergroup threat and the prospective fear of being affected by military conflict. We hypothesized that engaging in helping behaviors directed towards refugees would prompt individuals to perceive these actions as serving vital self-functions (i.e., satisfying basic psychological needs), which, in turn, could potentially mitigate the intergroup threat perceived in relation to the refugees while amplifying the prospective fear of potential warfare. Data were collected over three waves of a panel study during the initial 2 months of the refugee crisis in Poland arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our findings reveal that providing assistance to war refugees at Time 1 resulted in greater perceived personal benefits of helping at Time 2. This enhanced perceived functionality of helping subsequently predicted diminished intergroup refugee threat perceptions (both realistic and symbolic), but also heightened fear levels concerning the potential impact of war at Time 3. These results were consistent across models accounting for lagged-1 and more stringent lagged-2 autoregressive effects. Importantly, the observed temporal relationships regarding realistic threat and fear of war were less robust against individual difference factors. These findings enrich the ongoing discourse on the impacts of aiding individuals fleeing conflict zones and how beliefs about the purpose of such means of assistance shape constructive intergroup relations.

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Madan, S., Savani, K., Mehta, P. H., Phua, D. Y., Hong, Y.-Y., & Morris, M. W. (2025). Stress reactivity and sociocultural learning: More stress-reactive individuals are quicker at learning sociocultural norms from experiential feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(6), 1292–1314. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000487

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• When interacting with others in unfamiliar sociocultural settings, people need to learn the norms guiding appropriate behavior. The present research investigates an individual difference that helps this kind of learning: stress reactivity. Interactions in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting are stressful, particularly when the actor fails to follow its rules. Although stress is typically considered a liability, more stress-reactive individuals may be more motivated to improve and, thus, quicker to learn these rules. Consistent with this idea, a pilot study found that people genetically inclined to stress reactivity, as computed by a genetic profile score across 59 single-nucleotide polymorphisms on 10 different genes, learned unfamiliar sociocultural norms from experiential feedback at a faster rate (i.e., exhibited a greater increase in accuracy across trials). Study 1 found that participants with higher acute cortisol reactivity in response to a physical stressor were faster at learning unfamiliar sociocultural norms. Study 2 conceptually replicated these results using a self-report measure of dispositional stress reactivity. Study 3 found that self-reported dispositional stress reactivity similarly predicted the rate of learning in a sociocultural task and a nonsocial task. Study 4 provided evidence for the underlying mechanism—participants higher on dispositional stress reactivity experienced more stress early in the sociocultural norm learning task, which predicted faster learning overall and lower stress later on in the task. These findings indicate that more stress-reactive individuals get more stressed out from the negative feedback that they receive in social interactions in unfamiliar settings, which motivates them to learn the relevant norms.

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Klein, J. W. (2025). The family as the primary social group. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 48, e64. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X24001122

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• Moffett contends that societies should be considered the "primary" group with respect to their social ramifications. Although intriguing, this claim suffers from insufficient clarity and evidence. Rather, if any group is to be crowned supreme it should surely be the family, with its unique capacity to encourage pro-group behavior, shape other groups, and provide meaning.

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Owuamalam, C. K., Caricati, L., Tan, C. M., Matos, A. S., Bonetti, C., Rubin, M., ... & Marinucci, M. (2025). Re‐Examining Buchel et al.’s (2021) Test of the Status Legitimacy Hypothesis. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.3173

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• The status-legitimacy hypothesis posits that low-status groups more strongly endorse social hierarchies and disadvantageous systems (i.e., engage in system justification), particularly under extreme societal inequality. Buchel et al. (2021) found supportive evidence for this hypothesis based on a 28-nation survey (N = 48,802). However, other large-scale studies have produced contradictory evidence. Consequently, we re-examined Buchel et al.’s (2021) data, this time breaking down the critical status inequality interaction and visualizing the patterns with scatterplots. Contrary to the status-legitimacy hypothesis, our results often showed that both objective and subjective status were associated with system justification in the opposite direction–even in contexts of high societal inequality. However, higher societal inequality sometimes reduces the system justification gap between status groups. We discuss the implications of these mixed findings for the debate around the existence of a system justification motive.