We gladly invite you to the next week's "extraordinary Forum" with Martijn van Zomeren (University of Groningen), who will talk about "Hoping = Coping: Solving the riddle of hope in the psychology of collective action".

"For the psychology of collective action to achieve social change, hope is somewhat of a riddle. On the one hand, hope - the emotional experience of the possibility of change - seems naturally related to collective action, as suggested by a number of correlational studies. Yet on the other hand, the psychology of collective action suggests that more specific beliefs about the group's efficacy to bring about change are key, suggesting that hope, which lacks that agentic aspect, may not suffice to increase collective action. Utilizing a psychological coping perspective on collective action, we conducted two series of experiments that were designed to test whether hoping has a problem-focused coping function (to change the external problem) or an emotion-focused coping function (to regulate negative emotions without changing the external problem). The first set of experiments across different political contexts in Israel and the UK showed that group efficacy beliefs predicted collective action, but only when hope was high, which is suggestive of hope's problem-focused coping function. Yet in the second set of experiments in the context of climate change in the US, we found that hoping in and of itself did neither increase group efficacy beliefs nor collective action, which is suggestive of hope's emotion-focused coping function. I discuss the implications of these findings for the psychology of collective action, and suggest a coping-based solution for the riddle of hope in this context."

date: 04.02.2019, time: 16.15 h, room: X-E1-245