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This article reconstructs disengagement of women from extreme right groups not theoretically as individual decision-making process, but empirically as social identity work. A thorough analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with six female and six male former right-wing extremists demonstrates how extreme right membership identities of women are socially produced. In tension-laden interactions between women and men processes of “becoming and being an extreme right woman” unfold in the dimensions of caring feminity, masculinity, disciplined heterosexuality, and political subordination. All interviewed women contributed fundamentally to upholding and disseminating right-wing structures and ideologies. The analysis reveals that the women fashion a disengagement narrative in which they emphasize their true and good core self. The narratives focus on suffering, or demonstrate how the core self was deceived by circumstances into extremist activity. The results correspond with the narrative identity theory of desistance and offer initial starting points for a professional deradicalisation practice that is sensitive to positive self-illusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prejudice is more prevalent among members of the working class than among members of the middle or upper class. It is still a matter of discussion whether education works to suppress prejudice among upper class members or, on the contrary, to enhance genuinely tolerant attitudes. We propose that (i) two indicators of social class-income and education-independently predict prejudice toward multiple targets as follows: lower levels of income and education are associated with higher levels of prejudice. (ii) The connection between social class and prejudice is explained by the endorsement of system-legitimating ideological attitudes, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). We tested these hypotheses in four studies using cross-sectional surveys in Europe (Studies 1 and 2, Ns = 11 330 and 2640) and longitudinal data from Germany and Chile (Studies 3 and 4, Ns = 343 and 388). Results show that education and income exert independent negative effects on prejudice. The effect of education is stronger than the effect of income, which is not stable across countries. The relationships between income and prejudice and education and prejudice are mediated by RWA and SDO. We conclude that people of the working class generally endorse an ideological configuration that is well suited for legitimating the social system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across cultures studies show that men score higher on social dominance orientation than women. This gender gap is considered invariant, but conflicting explanations are discussed: Some authors refer to evolutionary psychology and perceive the gender gap to be driven by sociobiological factors. Other authors argue that social roles or gender-stereotypical self-construals encouraged by intergroup comparisons are responsible for attitudinal gender difference. In Study 1 we analyzed sex differences in social dominance orientation in three German probability surveys (each n > 2300). Unexpectedly, the analyses yielded an inverse gender gap with higher values for social dominance orientation in women than in men. Interactions with age, education, political conservatism, and perceived inequity indicated that the inverse gender gap can be mainly attributed to older, conservative, (and less educated) respondents, and those who feel they get their deserved share. In Study 2 we replicated the well-known gender gap with men scoring higher than women in social dominance orientation among German students. Results are interpreted on the basis of biocultural interaction, which integrates the sociobiological, social role, and self-construal perspectives. Our unusual findings seem to reflect a struggle for status by members of low-status groups who consider group-based hierarchy the most promising option to improve their status. While younger women take advantage of a relational, feminine self-construal that leads to lower social dominance orientation in young women than in young men, older women are supposed to profit from an agentic self-construal that results in stronger social dominance orientation values. Specific characteristics of the culture in Germany seem to promote this strategy. Here, we discuss the female ideal of the national socialist period and the agentic female social role in the post-war era necessitated by the absence of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to research on European prejudice and discrimination. First, we list the distinctive characteristics of a European perspective and provide a short sketch of European immigration and ethnic groups. Europe has become a multicultural community. Nevertheless, public opinion and the continent's politics often do not reflect this empirical fact. Prejudice and discrimination directed at immigrants are a widespread phenomena across Europe. Several cross-European surveys support this conclusion, although theoretically driven surveys on prejudice and discrimination in Europe remain rare. Cross-European research studies classical and modern theories of prejudice and discrimination and attempts to uncover the psychological mechanisms that explain individual readiness to exclude ethnic groups. A brief sketch of recent European research is presented. This issue offers both important cross-national perspectives as well as needed comparisons with the more studied case of racial prejudice and discrimination in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different types of prejudice are usually treated as separate constructs. We propose that they constitute a syndrome of group-focused enmity (GFE), that is, they are related to each other and share a common core that is strongly predicted by a generalized ideology of inequality. Furthermore, GFE components are supposed to have similar predictors and outcomes. An empirical test is presented using structural equation modeling on the syndrome, its causes, consequences, and structural stability over time. The study relies on three German cross-sectional probability samples (each = 2,700) and a related panel study (2002, 2003, and 2004). The idea of a GFE syndrome is strongly supported. Future research is discussed, as well as alternative approaches of a common prejudice factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the connections between prejudice and specific attitudes toward acculturation in Germany. Results of surveys confirm the hypothesis that prejudice is related to ideologies of assimilation and segregation among majoritygroup members. Moreover, experimental and correlational studies indicate that these attitudes are linked to discriminatory behavior. Further analyses of studies with ethnic minorities prove that prejudice and acculturation are linked within minority groups as well. Additionally it is shown that prejudice is functional in order for minorities to acculturate. These studies confirm the impression that there is a close link between macrosocial and microsocial levels of coping with migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three issues concerning the frequently negative correlation between formal education and ethnic prejudice, namely its reliability, its validity and the manner in which it is mediated. Reliability is demonstrated across three indices of ethnic attitudes in seven representative samples drawn from four European countries (West Germany, Netherlands, France, Great Britain; total N=3788). The Hypothesis that this correlation reflects only the tendency of more highly educated respondents to give more socially desirable answers and not true attitude differences was inconsistent with the finding from the survey data that educational level also correlated negatively with responses to an index of subtle prejudice. Results from an experiment employing the bogus pipeline procedure similarly refute this hypothesis, indicating that significant education-related differences in expressed prejudice remain under conditions in which the tendency to give socially desirable responses is reduced. Finally, path analysis based on the survey data show that part but not all of the association between low education and ethnic prejudice is mediated by social psychological variables. Particularly group relative deprivation, perceived belief incongruency, political conservation, and acception of inter-ethnic contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine German participants' assessment of the time of National Socialism. Especially for younger generations, shifts in the culture of remembrance may change their assessments of historical events. We argue that factors such as increased formal education about the topic and decreased personal contact with contemporary witnesses can weaken attributional biases (e.g., ingroup favouritism) in the assessment of the role of the German population during the time of National Socialism. We use data from a German representative sample (N = 1,000) and focus on the links between participants' age and the estimated involvement of the German population under National Socialism as perpetrators, victims, helpers, and "bystanders," as well as the agreement with explanations why the general population did not act against National Socialist crimes. Younger participants estimated the proportions of perpetrators and bystanders within the German population as higher and were less likely to agree that Germans did not know about the systematic killings. Older participants were more likely to agree with situational explanations for the population's inaction (i.e., that Germans did not know or did not have an opportunity to act against the crimes). We find a positive relation between a more critical perspective on the involvement of the population in the past and participants' feelings of responsibility in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transmission of national history in general and family narratives in particular is prone to censorship and bias, protecting or enhancing social identities. The authors propose that, as has been shown for national groups, families also create and pass on representations about their roles and behaviors through history. In a representative survey, 1000 German respondents estimated the percentages of victims, perpetrators, and those who helped potential victims during the time of National Socialism to be 35%, 34%, and 16%, respectively. For family representations, the percentages shifted toward helping (29%) and away from complicity (20%), while representations of victimhood were as prevalent (36%) as estimates for the general population. Systematic differences suggested an alignment of general social representations of history with family representations. Participants reporting a perpetrator family representation held more positive attitudes toward refugees coming to Germany today than participants who did not report such a representation. This link was mediated through differences in societal representations. The authors discuss family representations as an intermediate, more proximate prescriptive background and points of reference, according to which more general historical representations on a national level may be aligned, and individual present-day political attitudes and behaviors oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Differentiation' is identified as a key category, and an empirical system of differentiation is developed. The key category is divided into two subcategories, which are further dimensionalized. The analysis finds that highly identified fans differentiate themselves from other fans (both from their own club and from rival clubs) and strive for positive distinction. Violent acts as extreme forms of differentiation are identity-establishing for some of these fans. Confrontations with rival fans are actively sought to extend team competitions concerning the best support into a physical and violent plane and to enforce territorial claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of incidents over the past ten years in Germany reveals that the boundaries between targeted attacks in schools and terrorist attacks are starting to blur. Böckler, Leuschner, Roth, Zick, and Scheithauer (2018) recently presented a set of hypotheses about similarities between the developmental pathways of school attackers and lone actor terrorists. To date there is only a small body of empirical research comparing these two forms of targeted violence in depth. In order to fill this gap, this article presents findings from a qualitative analysis of prosecution files comparing the developmental pathways of German school attackers (N = 7; age range: 13 to 23) and Jihadi attackers (N = 7; age range: 21 to 28 years) who committed their attacks between 2000 and 2013. Using theoretical coding and constant case comparison, the contribution shows that the two phenomena have overlaps in which developmental processes and social mechanisms are similar. Both school attackers and Jihadi attackers frame their act of violence using cultural scripts and perform the attack on a public stage where victims are attacked not on the basis of personal conflicts but because of their symbolic meaning. Taking into account the similarities in the perpetrators’ developmental pathways, the authors propose that it might be more fruitful from an operational perspective to discuss severe target school violence and terrorist attacks under a common concept of demonstrative violence than to artificially assign them to exclusive classes of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While conducting a survey in Egypt in the summer of 2013, we were interrupted by the ouster of President Morsi, but continued afterward, resulting in a unique sample set. With these data, we were able to investigate, with a quasi-experimental design, the impact of the ouster, a major turning point in the Egyptian revolution, on the attitudes of Egyptians regarding political participation, the role of religion in politics, and Islamist ideology. After the ouster, overall willingness to participate in politics, whether in form of demonstrations, voting, or strikes, declined. Regarding the role of religion in politics, participants favored less involvement of religion in politics after the ouster. The attitude towards jihadism facet of Islamist ideology changed slightly from strong disagreement to disagreement. Besides the ouster, a factor generally affecting the political attitudes was education: the more highly educated individuals were the more willingness they showed to become politically active. Another factor was the general religious orientation: the more religious individuals were the more important for them was religion for politics. However, the religious orientation had no effect on the attitude towards Islamist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses systematically different concepts of anomie as an explanation of Group-focused Enmity (GFE) against selected groups in society. The GFE research programme has demonstrated the utility of applying the concept of ‘anomia’ – an individual reaction to disruptions in the normative order – to explain prejudices against vulnerable groups. This paper extends the GFE research programme by incorporating insights from Institutional Anomie Theory, a theoretical perspective originally introduced in the criminological literature. Drawing upon this, it develops a theoretical model that links perceptions of weakened non-economic institutions with prejudices against groups that are readily seen as being ‘unprofitable’. These perceptions are theorized to affect prejudices against such groups via a pathway of ‘marketized’ attitudes and orientations, net of any influence of anomia. This paper’s theoretical model was assessed with data from a representative survey of the German population (n = 840). The results of Structural Equation Modelling support most of the main hypotheses, revealing the additional value for prejudice research of measuring the individual experience of anomie not only as anomia but also with respect to processes of marketization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most Germans reacted welcoming toward newly arrived refugees in 2015 and 2016, parallelly overt hateful reactions such as hate crimes, social exclusion, and increasing right‐wing electoral support have been registered all over Germany with several regions emerging as "hot spots" in these regards. Among them was our case, the mid‐sized town of Bautzen in the state of Saxony, where intergroup conflict and violent clashes between locals and refugees caused news headlines. To analyze intergroup conflicts in the ethnically super‐homogenous context of Bautzen, we performed a qualitative interview study. More specifically, we conducted 48 semistructured interviews with residents and members of the victimized outgroup of refugees. Our analysis reveals that the societal basis of intergroup conflict in Bautzen seems to be a distinct climate of exclusion aimed at tagged outgroups. Refugees report facing everyday discriminatory practices and even violence. Further, this specific local climate is facilitated by several Bautzen‐specific characteristics on the macro level, such as low number of foreigners and high levels of right‐wing electoral support. Our findings suggest that limited diversity and widespread stereotypes affect locals' reactions toward and perception of refugees. We discuss our results in light of the intergroup contact hypothesis and encourage more qualitative research on the nexus of intergroup contact and intergroup conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prejudices legitimize the discrimination against groups by declaring them to be of unequal, especially of less, worth. This legitimizing power is highly relevant in social conflicts of modern societies that are governed by market-oriented value systems. However, prejudice research has yet to be linked to sociological discourses on the marketization of society. We argue that Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a theory originally developed to explain crime rates, offers a fruitful macro-sociological framework for a better understanding of micro-social prejudices that emerge along with processes of marketization. Extending IAT to explain prejudices in a German study based on survey data offers a first attempt to underpin our theoretical hypotheses with empirical data. Although the results need to be interpreted with due caution, they suggest that the extended IAT model can be usefully applied to explain how a marketized mentality is related to different forms of institutional integration, and how it is conducive to specific prejudices that emerge in market-dominated societies against purported economically burdening social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies tested the prediction that more positive intergroup contact would be associated with reduced aggressive intergroup action tendencies, an effect predicted to occur indirectly via reduced intergroup threat perceptions, and over and above well-established effects of contact on intergroup attitudes. Study 1, using data based on a cross-section of the general population of eight European countries (France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the UK; N = 7,042), examined this hypothesis in the context of aggressive action tendencies towards immigrants. Study 2, using longitudinal data obtained from a general population sample in Northern Ireland, considered effects on aggressive action tendencies between ethno-religious groups in conflict. Both studies confirmed our predictions, showing that while perceived threat was associated with greater intergroup aggressive tendencies, positive intergroup contact was indirectly associated with reduced aggressive action tendencies, via reduced intergroup threat. Findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical contributions of this research for understanding the relationship between intergroup contact and intergroup aggression. Aggr. Behav. 40:250-262, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to authors of previous single-nation studies, we propose that supporting multiculturalism (MC) or assimilation (AS) is likely to have different effects in different countries, depending on the diversity policy in place in a particular country and the associated norms. A causal model of intergroup attitudes and behaviors, integrating both country-specific factors (attitudes and perceived norms related to a particular diversity policy) and general social-psychological determinants (social dominance orientation), was tested among participants from countries where the pro-diversity policy was independently classified as low, medium, or high (N = 1,232). Results showed that (a) anti-Muslim prejudice was significantly reduced when the pro-diversity policy was high; (b) countries differed strongly in perceived norms related to MC and AS, in ways consistent with the actual diversity policy in each country and regardless of participants' personal attitudes toward MC and AS; (c) as predicted, when these norms were salient, due to subtle priming, structural equation modeling with country included as a variable provided support for the proposed model, suggesting that the effect of country on prejudice can be successfully accounted by it; and (d) consistent with the claim that personal support for MC and AS played a different role in different countries, within-country mediation analyses provided evidence that personal attitudes toward AS mediated the effect of social dominance orientation on prejudice when pro-diversity policy was low, whereas personal attitudes toward MC was the mediator when pro- diversity policy was high. Thus, the critical variables shaping prejudice can vary across nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines so-called secondary transfer effects of intergroup contact, a phenomenon whereby positive intergroup contact experiences can influence attitudes not only toward encountered (primary) outgroups but also toward other (secondary) outgroups that were not initially involved in the intergroup encounter. The current study relies on a unique cross-sectional sample of the general population drawn from eight European countries (N = 7,042) to examine the relationship between intergroup contact with immigrants and attitudes toward primary (immigrants) and secondary (homosexuals and Jews) outgroups. Results showed that intergroup contact was not only directly related with primary outgroup attitudes but also indirectly associated with secondary outgroup attitudes, via attitude generalization. These relationships occurred primarily for individuals low in social dominance orientation. Findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to understanding secondary transfer effects of contact as well as the role of social dominance orientation as a moderator of such effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using three diverse European surveys, we test the relationship between relative deprivation (RD) and anti-immigrant prejudice. We find that both group relative deprivation (GRD) and individual relative deprivation (IRD) are found primarily among working-class respondents who are politically alienated. We also find that GRD, but not IRD, serves as a proximal correlate of prejudice. IRD's effects on prejudice are largely mediated through GRD. In addition, GRD partially mediates the effects of such distal predictors of prejudice as education and family income. Finally, blaming the victim mediates in part the GRD link with prejudice. These results lead to a socially situated path model of RD's effects on prejudice with public policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a commentary on the article by Sommer and colleagues about the role of social dynamics in school shootings. Topics discussed include the phenotypical characteristics of a school shooting, the link between the experience of social maltreatment and a violent behavior, and the concept of equifinality, introduced by the researchers, which means that differing paths can lead to a school shooting.