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Land use changes, driven by human activities such as agricultural intensification and urban expansion, have drastic effects on biodiversity. As these changes are anticipated to continue, understanding species’ adaptations to their evolving habitats is essential to find solutions for effective conservation efforts and sustainable management. In this study, we investigated how long-term changes in the agricultural landscape influence the breeding performance of a population of barn owls (Tyto alba) residing in nest boxes using data collected from 1993 until 2020. Specifically, we assessed how agricultural intensification, urbanization, and site availability affected barn owls' site occupancy and breeding success. Our results reveal that nest boxes surrounded by more agricultural fields are more likely to be occupied and have higher fledging success. Additionally, nest boxes installed higher on the barn were more likely to be occupied. Owls laid more eggs in nest boxes facing North than South or East. Clutches laid in nest boxes installed at higher altitudes were smaller. Finally, nest boxes with a higher density of surrounding nest boxes were less likely to be occupied and had smaller clutches. These insights show barn owls high reliance on the agricultural landscape surrounding their nesting sites, but also the importance of nest box characteristics to optimize their breeding success.

IntroductionPreparing host-society children for contact with refugees coming into their classes poses a new and important challenge for countries with little prior experience in integration. Imagined contact is a prejudice-reduction intervention that can be particularly useful in this context. However, its long-term effects and potential age-related variations in its efficacy among primary school children remain understudied.MethodsThis study investigated the short-term and long-term effects of an imagined contact school intervention on the change in attitudes and contact intentions of 1,544 children aged 7–15. Of these, 827 participated in a four-session-long intervention delivered by their teachers within their regular classes, while 717 served as a comparison group. Short-term effects were assessed approximately one week after the last intervention session, with long-term effects evaluated around two and a half months later.ResultsOur findings indicate that the imagined contact intervention instigates positive changes in intergroup attitudes and contact intentions in both the short term and long term, but only for the children in the lower grades of primary school.DiscussionWhile the durability of these effects among younger participants holds promise for future use of imagined contact in schools, we also scrutinize potential developmental and methodological explanations of the absence of expected intervention effects among older children.

Interdependence, a mutual dependence between entities, is a key concept to understand interactions occurring in social and natural environments. We argue that understanding social and natural phenomena in terms of interdependence could predict children's pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). The existing literature reveals a lack of studies promoting PEBs among children. We first reviewed the literature on interdependence to demonstrate why it is a theoretically viable construct to foster PEBs in children. Second, we identified a lack of instruments to measure children's preference for explanations in terms of interdependence. Thus, in study 1, we developed and administered a 9-item vignette-based scale combining pictures and everyday situations with various explanations, the Preference for Explanations in Terms of Interdependence scale—PETI to 351 Swiss pupils (10-12 years old). Exploratory factor analysis revealed a one-dimensional structure. Analyses showed satisfying nomological and predictive validity (on self-reported behaviors). Study 2 (N = 96) was conducted at recreational areas and aimed at extending the predictive validity of the PETI scale to actual behaviors. Contrary to our expectations, results revealed no direct effect of the PETI score, but a significant main effect of age, and a significant interaction effect between PETI and age showing that PETI was more positively associated to PEBs for older (10-13 years old) than for younger (6-9 years old) children. Reliability analyses suggested that the PETI scale is better suited for children aged 10 and over. We discuss the utility of the PETI scale in studying the relationship between children's understanding of interdependence and the endorsement of PEBs.

To encourage energy conservation, some interventions refer to abstract, large-scale, and complex phenomena (e.g., climate change), while others rely on concrete actions (e.g., changing light bulbs) and consequences (e.g., saving money). Some also combine both. Mostly conducted in non-applied settings, existing studies that compare the impact of abstract vs. concrete pro-environmental interventions have yielded mixed results. Moreover, they have not documented the potential advantage, in the long term, of adding abstract information to an existing concrete intervention. With this goal in mind, we joined an intervention in which households of two neighbourhoods (N = 177) participated in an energy conservation programme encouraging and facilitating concrete energy-conserving behaviours. We randomly assigned about half of the households to a concrete-only condition (the basic intervention) and half to a condition in which we also provided abstract environmental information. Results showed that an abstract message added to a concrete intervention successfully increased the amount of attention households reported paying to energy consumption six months after the intervention, compared to the concrete-only intervention. An abstract message also had an indirect impact on energy saving behaviours six months later, through increased biospheric (environmental) values. Taken together, these results suggest that low-level construal goals, such as everyday energy saving behaviours, should be accompanied by high-level construal goals, such as limiting climate change, to increase individuals’ willingness to act for the environment.

Higher education institutes (HEI) face considerable challenges in navigating how to respond to the escalating and intertwined socio-ecological sustainability crises. Many dedicated individuals working in the sector are already driving meaningful action through rigorous research, teaching, knowledge sharing, and public engagement, while there is a growing consensus that sector-wide change is needed to ensure that aspirational declarations and positive individual actions translate into sustainable and transformative change. This article seeks to contribute to such efforts by illustrating a number of trends, examples, and reflections on how third-level educational institutes can act sustainably. We highlight the potential of five strategies HEI could employ to support the creation of a more sustainable future namely, (i) innovative approaches to climate change education; (ii) research agendas for societal transformations; (iii) providing climate change education for professional development; (iv) supporting public intellectuals; and (iv) investing in whole-systems approaches to greening the campus. The insights are the product of an interdisciplinary working group with members from across Europe, Australia, and the UK. These international examples provide insight and a sense of possibility for future application.

There is evidence that democracies are under threat around the world while the quest for strong leaders is increasing. Although the causes of these developments are complex and multifaceted, here we focus on one factor: the extent to which citizens express materialist and post-materialist concerns. We explore whether objective higher levels of democracy are differentially associated with materialist and post-materialist concerns and, in turn, whether this is related to the wish for a strong leader. Testing this hypothesis across 27 countries (N = 5,741) demonstrated a direct negative effect of democracies’ development on the wish for a strong leader. Further, multi-level mediation analysis showed that the relation between the Democracy Index and the wish for a strong leader was mediated by materialist concerns. This pattern of results suggests that lower levels of democracy are associated with enhanced concerns about basic needs and this is linked to greater support for strong leaders.

If today the anthropogenic origin of climate change gathers almost total scientific consensus, human pro-environmental action is not changing with sufficient impact to keep global warming within the 1.5° limit. Environmental psychology has traditionally focused on the underlying barriers towards more pro-environmental behaviours. Emotions—like fear or anger—may act as such barriers especially in case of radical change (e.g., degrowth). While minority influence has been extensively applied to understand societal change, it has rarely been applied to understand the emotional responses that may hinder counter-normative pro-environmental messages. However, past literature on emotions shows that, in challenging situations—the likes of radical minority conflict—people will tend to use their emotional reaction to maintain societal status quo. Two studies investigated how participants emotionally react towards a counter-normative pro-environmental minority message (advocating degrowth). A qualitative (thematic analyses) and a quantitative (emotional self-report paradigm) studies showed that participants report emotions that allow them to realign themselves with the cultural backdrop of the social dominant paradigm (growth), thus resisting change. Specifically, although all participants tend to demonstrate higher proportions of control-oriented emotions, men do so more. These effects, as well as questions of cultural and ideological dominance, are discussed considering barriers towards pro-environmentalism.

In this 28-country study (N = 6112), we assessed how subjective perceptions and objective indicators of wealth were associated with majority group members’ perceptions of realistic threat related to immigration. Subjective wealth was assessed by individuals’ perceptions of their personal wealth (current/anticipated) and of their country´s wealth, whereas objective country-level wealth was assessed by GDP and HDI. Multilevel analyses showed that living in a country with a lower objective wealth and perceiving the country's relative wealth as low were associated with higher levels of perceived realistic threat. We also found that an anticipated decrease in personal wealth in the future was associated with higher threat perceptions only in low HDI countries. Our results suggest that perceived realistic threat is fostered by a perceived decline in the current wealth of the country, and country-level wealth may play a role in calibrating threat responses to anticipated personal wealth.

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.

Considering the evolving and unpredictable job market, adaptability is an important skill for young adults. Such adaptability implies that schools need to teach key social competences, like communication, collaboration, or problem-solving. In this area, a gender gap has consistently been found, showing that boys display social competences less than girls. A large-scale nationwide multilab longitudinal experiment--the ProFAN project--was conducted in France among more than 10,000 vocational high-school students. Its primary goal was to develop and test an intervention promoting a range of psychological and psychosocial variables in vocational high schools, including social competences. This 2-year long, three-wave field experiment compared the effects of a cooperative learning method--the jigsaw classroom, that entails positive goal and resource interdependence--to two control conditions: one that involves cooperation with resource independence, and the other that remains business-as-usual. This article focuses on the differential development of perceived social competences of adolescent boys and girls over time, comparing the three pedagogical methods. Results of longitudinal multilevel modeling replicate the gender gap in perceived social competences and show that this gap widens with time. However, and most importantly, the analyses revealed that such widening of the gender gap was greater in the two control conditions than in the jigsaw condition, in which the evolution of boys' and girls' perceptions of social competences remained similar over time. Contributions to the understanding of the development and teaching of social competences in education settings are discussed.

Teachers' beliefs about students' errors are influenced by structural factors and by other beliefs towards education and students that teachers may hold. The literature on this topic has provided some evidence and some mixed results. Furthermore, some structural aspects related to errors have not been considered in framing teachers' beliefs about errors, such as the use of grades as a classroom assessment practice, which is strongly related to errors in testing situations. Based on these premises, this study aimed to explore teachers' beliefs about errors and the practices teachers report using to deal with students' errors in the classroom and teachers' beliefs about the interdependence between grades and errors. Italian teachers (N = 33) from primary, middle, and secondary schools had been interviewed and the qualitative data were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. The results showed that, according to teachers, errors acquire different meanings in the learning process, which are related to the roles they play in fostering or not learning. Furthermore, in describing these roles teachers reported to use specific practices to deal with students' errors. Finally, teachers acknowledged that classroom assessment based on grades has a negative interdependency with errors that makes it difficult to present errors as a fruitful part of learning both in learning and testing situations. Our results reveal the ambivalence of teachers' beliefs about errors and shed light on the challenges the grading evaluation system poses to teachers.

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals' well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one's own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals' willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals' behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

Mugny and his colleagues have shown that conflict is sometimes detrimental for learning, but other times beneficial, depending on how it is regulated. Yet, it is assumed that laypeople perceive conflict as 'uniformly' negative. We argue that the valence of these lay perceptions depends on the mode of conflict regulation. Epistemic and relational protective conflict regulation behaviors (integrative and submissive response, respectively) can be described as more focused on the other than relational competitive conflict regulation (self-confirmatory response); thus, they should be perceived as more socially desirable. Moreover, epistemic and competitive regulations can be described as more focused on the self than protective regulation; thus, they should be perceived as more socially useful. First-year psychology students ('N' = 119) participants evaluated three bogus respondents allegedly regulating conflict in an epistemic, competitive, or protective manner. Results supported both hypotheses, suggesting that conflict is not to be avoided per se and can be positively valued as a function of its regulation.

A partner’s competence should logically favor cooperative learning. However, research in cooperative learning has shown that a partner’s competence may or may not activate a threatening social comparison and yields dual effects: It is beneficial when students work on complementary information while it is detrimental when students work on identical information. Two studies conducted at elementary school (study 1 with 24 fourth graders working on encyclopedic texts, and study 2 with 28 fifth graders working on argumentative texts) replicated that interaction: Information distribution (complementary vs. identical information) moderated the relationship between partner’s competence and pupils’ learning outcomes. The relation between partner’s competence and students’ performances was positive when working on complementary information, but negative when working on identical information. A third study confirmed that working on identical information led to a competitive social comparison whereas complementary information reinforced the pupils’ cooperation perception. Contributions to cooperative learning research are discussed in terms of the competitive comparisons that may arise during cooperative learning at elementary school.

Existing research on the education of refugee children has been conducted in countries with a longstanding tradition of refugee integration. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the integration process of refugee children in Croatian schools. Croatia is a small EU country with limited experience in refugee integration. The phenomenological approach was used to examine the experiences and perspectives of the relevant actors. Interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with refugee children (N = 15), their parents (N = 5), classmates (N = 50), and school staff (N = 54) from six elementary schools in Zagreb. Data analyses suggested three general needs: educational, language, and social, each of them connected to more specific needs, challenges, and suggestions. The results of the study are discussed within the Schachner et al. (2017) framework of immigrant adolescents' acculturation.

This Editorial introduces the Special Collection “Conflicts in social influence: A Festschrift in honour of Gabriel Mugny”, which celebrates Gabriel Mugny’s pioneer role in developing a social psychological understanding of the structuring role of conflict. The article outlines Gabriel Mugny's contribution to social psychology in general, and to social development and minority influence in particular. It also presents the articles included in the Special Collection.

Research on attitudinal ambivalence is flourishing, but no research has studied how others perceive its expression. We tested the hypothesis that the expression of attitudinal ambivalence could be positively valued if it signals careful consideration of an issue. More specifically, ambivalence should be judged higher on social utility (competence) but not on social desirability (warmth), compared to clear-cut attitudes. This should be the case for controversial (vs. consensual) issues, where ambivalence can signal some competence. The participants in four experiments indeed evaluated ambivalence higher on a measure of social utility, compared to clear-cut (pro-normative and counter-normative) attitudes, when the attitude objects were controversial; they judged pro-normative attitudes higher for both social utility and social desirability when the attitude objects were consensual. Attitudinal ambivalence can therefore be positively valued, as it is perceived as competence when the expression of criticism is socially accepted.

Sociologists coined the term "anomie" to describe societies that are characterized by disintegration and deregulation. Extending beyond conceptualizations of anomie that conflate the measurements of anomie as 'a state of society' and as a 'state of mind', we disentangle these conceptualizations and develop an analysis and measure of this phenomenon focusing on anomie as a perception of the 'state of society'. We propose that anomie encompasses two dimensions: a perceived breakdown in social fabric (i.e., disintegration as lack of trust and erosion of moral standards) and a perceived breakdown in leadership (i.e., deregulation as lack of legitimacy and effectiveness of leadership). Across six studies we present evidence for the validity of the new measure, the Perception of Anomie Scale (PAS). Studies 1a and 1b provide evidence for the proposed factor structure and internal consistency of PAS. Studies 2a-c provide evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Finally, assessing PAS in 28 countries, we show that PAS correlates with national indicators of societal functioning and that PAS predicts national identification and well-being (Studies 3a & 3b). The broader implications of the anomie construct for the study of group processes are discussed.

We tested whether the goal to attain normative superiority over other students, referred to as performance-approach goals, is particularly distractive for high-Working Memory Capacity (WMC) students-that is, those who are used to being high achievers. Indeed, WMC is positively related to high-order cognitive performance and academic success, a record of success that confers benefits on high-WMC as compared to low-WMC students. We tested whether such benefits may turn out to be a burden under performance-approach goal pursuit. Indeed, for high achievers, aiming to rise above others may represent an opportunity to reaffirm their positive status-a stake susceptible to trigger disruptive outcome concerns that interfere with task processing. Results revealed that with performance-approach goals-as compared to goals with no emphasis on social comparison-the higher the students' WMC, the lower their performance at a complex arithmetic task (Experiment 1). Crucially, this pattern appeared to be driven by uncertainty regarding the chances to outclass others (Experiment 2). Moreover, an accessibility measure suggested the mediational role played by status-related concerns in the observed disruption of performance. We discuss why high-stake situations can paradoxically lead high-achievers to sub-optimally perform when high-order cognitive performance is at play.

In spite of official intentions to reduce inequalities at University, students' socio-economic status (SES) is still a major determinant of academic success. The literature on the dual function of University suggests that University serves not only an educational function (i.e., to improve students' learning), but also a selection function (i.e., to compare people, and orient them towards different positions in society). Because current assessment practices focus on the selection more than on the educational function, their characteristics fit better with norms and values shared by dominant high-status groups and may favour high-SES students over low-SES students in terms of performances. A focus on the educational function (i.e., mastery goals), instead, may support low-SES students' achievement, but empirical evidence is currently lacking. The present research set out to provide such evidence and tested, in two field studies and a randomised field experiment, the hypothesis that focusing on University's educational function rather than on its selection function may reduce the SES achievement gap. Results showed that a focus on learning, mastery-oriented goals in the assessment process reduced the SES achievement gap at University. For the first time, empirical data support the idea that low-SES students can perform as well as high-SES students if they are led to understand assessment as part of the learning process, a way to reach mastery goals, rather than as a way to compare students to each other and select the best of them, resulting in performance goals. This research thus provides a theoretical framework to understand the differential effects of assessment on the achievement of high and low-SES students, and paves the way toward the implementation of novel, theory-driven interventions to reduce the SES-based achievement gap at University.

Exams with numerus clausus are very common in Medicine, Business Administration and Law. They are intended to select a predefined number of academic candidates on the basis of their rank rather than their absolute performance. Various scholars and politicians believe that numerus clausus policies are a vector of academic excellence. We argue, however, that they could have ironic epistemic effects. In comparison with selective policies based on criterion-based evaluations, selection via numerus clausus creates negative interdependence of competence (i.e., the success of some students comes at the expense of the others). Thus, we expect it to impair students' sense of self-efficacy and--by extension--the level of mastery goals they adopt, as well as their actual learning. Two field studies respectively reported that presence (versus absence) and awareness (versus ignorance) of numerus clausus policies at University was associated with a decreased endorsement of mastery goals; this effect was mediated by a reduction in self-efficacy beliefs. Moreover, an experimental study revealed that numerus clausus negatively predicted learning; this effect was, again, mediated by a reduction in self-efficacy beliefs. Practical implications for the selection procedures in higher education are discussed.

Numerous studies have examined the effects of gender diversity in groups on creative performance, and no clear effect has been identified. Findings depend on situational cues making gender diversity more or less salient in groups. A large-scale study on two cohorts (N = 2,261) was conducted among business students to examine the impact of the gender diversity in small groups on divergent thinking in an idea-generation task performed by synchronous electronic brainstorming. Participants were automatically randomized in three- or four-member groups to generate ideas during 10 min on a gendered or neutral task. Then, five categories of groups where the proportion of men/women in groups varied from three/four men to three/four women were compared to examine creative performance on three divergent thinking measures (fluency, flexibility, and originality). A Multivariate Generalized Linear Mixed Model (mGLMM) showed greater fluency in all-women groups than in other groups (except mixed-gender groups composed of two men and two women), and more specifically "solo" groups composed of a single woman/man among a majority of men/women. For flexibility and originality, the superiority of all-women groups was found only in comparison to "solo" groups composed of a single woman. As gender differences are more salient in "solo" groups than in other groups faultlines may appear in groups, leading to a deleterious impact on creative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]