The relation of justice sensitivity and social identification for predicting international solidarity

• Applicant: Dr. Nadine Knab
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555994432

The consequences of natural disasters or political violence regularly lead to expressions of solidarity with the affected people. This solidarity can manifest in various forms of support, such as protesting for human rights or sending relief supplies, which can be formalized as autonomy-oriented or dependency-oriented helping and have relevance for the maintenance or challenge of social inequality. Many of the challenges that the world is facing today require a tremendous effort from the world community as a whole, thus solidarity is necessary to ameliorate the challenges of the future.Psychology has a long tradition to predict and explain prosocial behavior towards other social groups and identify when support is withheld. To advance psychological theory in explaining and predicting solidarity-based actions for disadvantaged groups, it is crucial to integrate perspectives at both the interpersonal and intergroup levels. Specifically, I aim to connect two constructs from personality and social psychology that share certain propensities in predicting solidarity-based actions. I define solidarity-based actions as those undertaken by an advantaged group member to benefit a disadvantaged group or its members. In personality psychology a stable personality factor, justice sensitivity, has been postulated to lead to situational injustice perceptions and to play a key role for predicting action intentions on behalf of others, mediated by emotional reactions. In particular, solidarity-based action tendencies should be predicted by the personality trait “concern for the justice of others”. This path is analogous to the one emphasized in social-psychological theory, which highlights the roles of social identification in predicting solidarity with disadvantaged groups. Despite the similarity in processes, the connections between justice sensitivity and social identification in predicting solidarity-based actions have been largely unexplored. Therefore, I plan an integrated empirical investigation of these social-psychological and personality perspectives. Such an integrative approach aims to build a cumulative psychological science. This research project will employ various research paradigms to address these questions. The initial phase will use correlational designs, followed by experiments and an adapted economic game. The project also includes a virtual reality study as an innovative method to induce state-level justice sensitivity. In conclusion, this research project will contribute to both basic and applied research on the highly relevant topic of solidarity between social groups, which is crucial for addressing social equality issues.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Manfred Schmitt; Professorin Dr. Melanie Caroline Steffens