Eran Halperin
Biographic Data
| ID | 229871 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eran Halperin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eran |
| FAMILY NAME | Halperin |
| SIGNATURE | HALPERIN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Reichman University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3379-2935 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 151 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1431 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 149 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 21 |
Not‐so‐great expectations
We examined how responses to outgroup indifference in conflict are shaped by the perceived nature of interdependence, which changes expectations of outgroup emotions toward the ingroup. Unlike conflicts perceived as positively interdependent, we hypothesized that in conflicts perceived as negatively interdependent, outgroup indifference would constitute a positive expectancy violation, thereby inviting favorable responses. Moreover, we examined a…
The illusion of political attitudes
Most polarization research focuses on conservatives and liberals, overlooking individuals holding cross-cutting attitude (CCA; mixed conservative and liberal views). Using survey data from two polarized countries, we distinguish between objective (actual) and subjective (perceived) CCA and examine their relationship with political news consumption. According to the results, many participants misperceived their attitude structure, seeing it as cro…
Effects of Framing Counter-Stereotypes as Surprising on Rethinking Prior Opinions About Outgroups
In this paper we address the unmet potential of counter-stereotypes (CS) by explicitly expressing feelings of surprise in media frames, to acknowledge the possible surprising effect attached to an encounter with a CS. Using a two-study survey-experiment (Nstudy 1 = 475, Nstudy 2 = 565) in the context of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, we demonstrate the moderating role of political ideology in the effect of exposure to surprise framing of CS …
One Size Might Not Fit All
Despite growing efforts to improve intergroup relations, the effectiveness of psychological intergroup interventions is often limited. We argue this modest impact stems from a one-size-fits-all approach that overlooks targeted outcomes and individual psychological profiles. Through a large-scale intervention tournament ( N = 3,685) examining Jewish-Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian citizens of Israel, we discovered that interventions show dist…
Broken Promises
In diverse societies, minority groups may face challenges when events signal exclusion from a superordinate identity (SOI) shared with the relevant majority groups. We examine how such SOI threats relate to hardline political attitudes, focusing on betrayal as a potential mechanism. A cross-sectional study of Ethiopian Jews in Israel ( N = 276) showed that priming an SOI threat was associated with support for violent resistance via betrayal. A tw…
Evidence for the Effectiveness of Large-Scale Disruptive Protests in the Context of Democratic Backsliding
The 2023 pro-democracy movement in Israel was marked by massive protests against proposed judicial reforms. Although they remained nonviolent, these protests became increasingly disruptive, employing roadblocks, strikes, and “days of disruption.” Did the choice to adopt disruptive tactics help or hurt the movement? To answer this question, we conducted a four-wave longitudinal study among 1,004 Israeli respondents. Latent growth-curve analysis re…
The disappointing (not hateful) divide
Affective polarization (AP), the tendency of opposing ideological groups to experience negative feelings towards each other, is a growing concern in Western democracies. While often discussed in terms of mutual hatred, there is a lack of comprehensive exploration of the discrete emotions underlying AP. As an initial attempt to address this gap, this research investigates the unique association between negative emotions (anger, fear, disgust, cont…
When the target matters
Identity fusion, a synergistic union of the personal self and an additional entity, motivates people to fight and self-sacrifice to defend the fusion target. Yet, it is unclear whether the mechanisms underlying fusion effects are general or target-specific. Therefore, this research investigated fusion effects with three distinct targets: groups, leaders, and values, while introducing violence support as a potential mediator. First, three cross-se…
Defend, Deny, Distance, and Dismantle
The experience of privilege can trigger psychological conflict among advantaged group members. Nonetheless, little work has explored strategies that advantaged group members use to manage their identities as privileged actors. Building on Knowles et al.’s framework and theories of intergroup relations, we address the conceptualization and measurement of advantaged group identity-management strategies. We aim to refine theorizing and validate a me…
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Motives and Barriers for Sustained Collective Action Toward Social Change
Israel’s year-long protest calling for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s resignation created an opportunity to examine unique factors influencing sustained collective action (SCA; i.e., repeated participation in social movement action for the same cause). As little is known about how to explain such dedication, we compared a well-established set of predictors of one-time collective action (CA) with a new predictors set of SCA, focusing on collective ins…
Increasing Perceived Outgroup Heterogeneity Following Exposure to Extreme Violence
Exposure to political violence often drives individuals toward extreme attitudes and greater support for retaliatory policies, including heightened perceptions of outgroup homogeneity. In violent intergroup conflicts, such perceptions can be especially dangerous, as they may justify indiscriminate violence against the outgroup. The current research aims to address Jewish Israelis’ perceptions of Palestinians’ variability following the October 7 H…
Virtual regulation
While emotions are pivotal in intergroup conflicts, individuals are less motivated to feel peace-promoting emotions in extreme conflicts. In the current research, we investigated whether virtual reality (VR) can be harnessed to overcome this limitation by utilizing two of its features: (a) the ability to simulate reality in an immersive way, and (b) to allow people to experience a situation from different perspectives immersively. Two studies don…
Examining the impact of learning about a resolved conflict on attitudes in an ongoing conflict
A popular intervention for increasing support for peace in violent intergroup conflicts is to describe the peaceful resolution of other conflicts. In four experiments, we tested the effectiveness of this approach in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by exposing Jewish-Israelis to information about the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, or about tourism in Northern Ireland as a control. We found that learning about the hist…
One step forward, two steps back
Ethnicity and Support for Restorative Justice
This research evaluates the impact of ethnic identity on support for restorative justice (RJ) within a multiethnic society facing a longstanding conflict. Two experimental studies were conducted in the context of Jewish–Arab relations in Israel. The first ( N = 446) analysed the influence of the ethnic identity of the offender, victim and participant on attitudes towards RJ. The second study ( N = 560) replicated the results of the first and expl…
Powerful victims
Competitive victimhood has significant implications for intergroup attitudes, including discrimination and hostility. The current two studies reveal the dynamic and context-dependent nature of competitive victimhood. We directly and simultaneously compared competitive victimhood among members of two groups: high-power and low-power. In Study 1, we found that under the transient threat circumstances of COVID-19, the high-power group (secular Israe…
Gone too far? The paradoxical effect of political elite radicalization
How does the rise of ideologically extreme leaders affect attitudes and beliefs among their supporters? Previous research on paradoxical thinking suggests that when individuals are exposed to a radicalized version of their held beliefs, they moderate them in response. However, it is yet unknown whether, how, and among whom, such moderation occurs in response to radicalization of individuals' favored leaders. The proposed study examines how an unf…
Legitimizing inclusion
Minority inclusion is important to ensure proper representation in democracies. Yet, even in democracies, minority inclusion in politics has historically been challenged by members of majority groups, largely due to perceived threat. Existing literature recognizes psychological factors—namely, values, threats, and norms—driving support for political inclusion, but knowledge of relevant interventions remains limited. We designed psychological inte…
A Threat to Cohesion
Growing affective polarization, or animosity between competing ideological groups, threatens to tear apart democratic societies worldwide. In nations that are facing external conflicts, the threat arising from these conflicts may boost internal cohesion and potentially reduce the internal threat of fragmentation. However, in the current study, we analyze survey datasets from two societies embedded in intractable conflicts, South Korea ( N = 897) …
Author Correction
Addressing climate change with behavioral science
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interve…
The affective gap
Bakker and Lelkes (2024) point at a critical gap in research on affective polarisation: the limited understanding of its affective components, mainly due to the reliance on a unidimensional operationalisation of affect in affective polarisation. They advocate for a broader approach to study affect, integrating explicit and implicit measures, and call on emotion specialists to address this gap. Acknowledging the complexity of affect in the ideolog…
Bonding versus fragmentation
Intragroup empathy is vital for resilience. However, it is often impaired in advantaged-dominated environments when one adopts advantaged-group characteristics to climb the social ladder. The current work examines contextual factors that may affect intragroup empathy: the motivation behind adopting the advantaged-group characteristics, and negative encounters with members of the advantaged group. We hypothesized that coercively, versus willingly,…
Beyond personal emotions
Attitude moralization in the context of collective action
Although much is known about why people engage in collective action participation (e.g., politicized identity, group-based anger), little is known about the psychological consequences of such participation. For example, can participation in collective action facilitate attitude moralization (e.g., moralize their attitudes on the topic)? Based on the idea that collective action contexts often involve a strong social movement fighting against an im…
A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism
Does exposure to terrorism lead to hostility toward minorities? Drawing on theories from clinical and social psychology, we propose a stress-based model of political extremism in which psychological distress—which is largely overlooked in political scholarship—and threat perceptions mediate the relationship between exposure to terrorism and attitudes toward minorities. To test the model, a representative sample of 469 Israeli Jewish respondents w…
Collective Emotions in Conflict Situations
It is well established today that emotions are an important part of most societal dynamics. The current article focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events and in contributing to the evolvement of a social context that maintains the emotional climat…
Group-based Hatred in Intractable Conflict in Israel
Countless theoretical texts have been written regarding the centrality of hatred as a force that motivates intergroup conflicts. However, surprisingly, at present, almost no empirical study has been conducted either on the nature and character of group-based hatred or on its implications for conflicts. Therefore, the goal of the current work has been to examine the nature of group-based hatred in conflicts. Three studies were conducted within the…
Life, Pocketbook, or Culture
This article tests the role played by different sources of threat perception in shaping exclusionist political attitudes of the majority toward two distinct minority groups in Israel: non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The authors distinguish between the impact of security, economic, and symbolic threats on exclusionist political attitudes. A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicated…
Anger, Hatred, and the Quest for Peace
Anger is often viewed as a destructive force in intergroup conflicts because of its links to aggressive behavior. The authors hypothesized, however, that anger should have constructive effects in those with low levels of hatred toward the out-group. Using experimental designs with subsamples of nationwide representative surveys, the authors conducted two studies within the context of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict. Study 1 showed that inducing …
The Central Role of Group‐Based Hatred as an Emotional Antecedent of Political Intolerance
In recent years, political scientists have shifted the focus of explaining political phenomena from the purely cognitive perspective to an integrated emotion‐cognition one. Yet most studies which examine antecedents of political intolerance ignore the potential role played by “gut feelings” or group‐based negative emotions in endorsing those attitudes. Moreover, even the few studies that deal with emotions and intolerance concentrate exclusively …
Ethos of conflict
Emotional barriers to peace
It is well-established today that the psychological barrier is one of the most prominent factors operating against efforts to promote peace. However, most studies along these lines have concentrated on the cognitive barriers and neglected the emotional ones. Hence, the main goal of this study is to create a deeper understanding of how emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and hatred) directed toward an adversary serve as a barrier to potential public supp…
Socio-psychological barriers to peace making
Socio-psychological barriers play a major role in the continuation of intractable conflicts. They are responsible for the socio-psychological closure that resists and prevents the entertainment of alternative information that could potentially facilitate the acceptance of ideas advancing peacemaking processes. In an attempt to validate a process model that depicts the functioning of the socio-psychological barriers to conflict resolution, an empi…
Affirmation, acknowledgment of in-group responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures
The positive effect of negative emotions in protracted conflict
Explaining Normative Versus Nonnormative Action
The current research investigates what motivates people to engage in normative versus nonnormative action. Prior research has shown that different emotions lead to different types of action. We argue that these differing emotions are determined by a more basic characteristic, namely, implicit theories about whether groups and the world in general can change. We hypothesized that incremental theories (beliefs that groups/the world can change) woul…
Emotions and Emotion Regulation in Intractable Conflict
Recent years have seen researchers making initial steps towards drawing on insights from emotion research in the study of intractable intergroup conflicts, but the knowledge on emotion and emotion regulation cannot simply be implanted “as is” into the study of these unique contexts. The present article begins with a discussion of the unique context of intractable conflicts and continues with an examination of the existing knowledge on emotion and…
Emotions in conflict
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and dr…
How Political Efficacy Relates to Online and Offline Political Participation
The rapid rise of digital media use for political participation has coincided with an increase in concerns about citizens' sense of their capacity to impact political processes. These dual trends raise the important question of how people's online political participation is connected to perceptions of their own capacity to participate in and influence politics. The current study overcomes the limitation of scarce high-quality cross-national and o…
The Distinctive Effects of Empathy and Hope in Intractable Conflicts
The goal of the current research was to examine how discrete positive intergroup emotional phenomena affect conflict-related attitudes in different contexts of intractable conflict. We hypothesized that empathy, but not hope would be negatively associated with aggressive attitudes during escalation, while hope, but not empathy would be associated with conciliatory attitudes during de-escalation. In study 1, we examined our hypotheses within a cor…
Socio-Psychological Barriers to Peace Making
The present article describes the socio–psychological barriers that play a major role in Israeli Jewish society in the attempts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict peacefully. After presenting the general conceptual framework of the socio–psychological barriers, our analysis of Israeli Jewish society focuses on two main aspects: conflict-supporting beliefs that provide well-based arguments that feed the continuation of the conflict, and e…
Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Peaceful Conflict Resolution
One of the most important psychological barriers to conflict resolution is the rigid structure of the sociopsychological repertoire that evolves in societies immersed in intractable conflict. This article examines ways to overcome the rigidity of this repertoire in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, in line with the prospect theory, the authors assumed that elicitation of beliefs about losses stemming from the continui…
Willingness to engage in intergroup contact
Intergroup anger in intractable conflict
Anger is one of the most common and destructive emotions in intergroup conflicts, frequently leading to an escalation of intergroup aggression. Prior research has focused on short-term antecedents of intergroup anger, typically using laboratory paradigms. We hypothesized that the long-term sentiment of anger (a broad predisposition that is unrelated to a particular action) would predict subsequent anger responses to provocation. We further hypoth…
Collective Emotions
When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together—whether the emotions are positive or negative and whether the situations are online or offline—we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which people experience emotions together, there appear to be emergent macrolevel affective processes that canno…
Emotion Regulation and the Cultivation of Political Tolerance
The goal of the current project is to integrate psychological research on emotion regulation with the study of democratic practices in general and political intolerance in particular. We hypothesized that the use of a well-established emotion regulation strategy, cognitive reappraisal, would be associated with lower levels of group-based negative emotions toward one’s least-liked group and lower levels of political intolerance toward that group. …
The Effect of Sociopsychological Barriers on the Processing of New Information about Peace Opportunities
During protracted intractable conflicts, society members develop a sociopsychological infrastructure that leads to selective and biased information processing, obstructing the penetration of new information that may facilitate peacemaking. To validate a process model that depicts the functioning of these barriers, we conducted a study among 207 Israeli Jews, focusing on the effects of long-term barriers on information processing. After measuring …
Making a Difference
How does individual political efficacy affect the construction of policy preferences? This article presents a model of individual-level politicization of policy preference, which draws on psychological and political explanations and posits that greater external political efficacy results in a stronger effect of political ideology on concrete policy preference. Two empirical studies that test this hypothesis are reported: an original survey experi…
Threatened by the uncontrollable
Democratic Values and Education for Democracy in the State of Israel
Throughout the existence of the State of Israel, democracy has been perceived by both leaders and citizens as one of the fundamental values making up the moral foundation for the state's existence. Yet, repeated infringements against essential democratic values and foundations have made evident that Israeli democracy faces a momentous test. In addition, various studies of public attitudes toward democracy have found that in many cases, the basis …
Threatened by the uncontrollable
Psychoeconomic Approaches to the Study of Hostile Attitudes Toward Minority Groups
Objective. We aspired to reexamine the well‐established assumption according to which low socioeconomic status, as a comprehensive concept, leads to prejudice and hostile attitudes toward minorities. Hence, we focused on examining the differential effect of each component of SES on one of the most important behavioral aspects of hostile attitudes—social distance. Just as importantly, we examined the assumption according to which threat perception…
Collective Emotions in Conflict Situations
It is well established today that emotions are an important part of most societal dynamics. The current article focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events and in contributing to the evolvement of a social context that maintains the emotional climat…
Emotions in conflict
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and dr…
Life, Pocketbook, or Culture
This article tests the role played by different sources of threat perception in shaping exclusionist political attitudes of the majority toward two distinct minority groups in Israel: non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The authors distinguish between the impact of security, economic, and symbolic threats on exclusionist political attitudes. A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicated…
Group-based Hatred in Intractable Conflict in Israel
Countless theoretical texts have been written regarding the centrality of hatred as a force that motivates intergroup conflicts. However, surprisingly, at present, almost no empirical study has been conducted either on the nature and character of group-based hatred or on its implications for conflicts. Therefore, the goal of the current work has been to examine the nature of group-based hatred in conflicts. Three studies were conducted within the…
Authoritarianism, perceived threat and exclusionism on the eve of the Disengagement
The Central Role of Group‐Based Hatred as an Emotional Antecedent of Political Intolerance
In recent years, political scientists have shifted the focus of explaining political phenomena from the purely cognitive perspective to an integrated emotion‐cognition one. Yet most studies which examine antecedents of political intolerance ignore the potential role played by “gut feelings” or group‐based negative emotions in endorsing those attitudes. Moreover, even the few studies that deal with emotions and intolerance concentrate exclusively …
Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Peaceful Conflict Resolution
One of the most important psychological barriers to conflict resolution is the rigid structure of the sociopsychological repertoire that evolves in societies immersed in intractable conflict. This article examines ways to overcome the rigidity of this repertoire in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, in line with the prospect theory, the authors assumed that elicitation of beliefs about losses stemming from the continui…
A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism
Does exposure to terrorism lead to hostility toward minorities? Drawing on theories from clinical and social psychology, we propose a stress-based model of political extremism in which psychological distress—which is largely overlooked in political scholarship—and threat perceptions mediate the relationship between exposure to terrorism and attitudes toward minorities. To test the model, a representative sample of 469 Israeli Jewish respondents w…
Terror, Resource Gains and Exclusionist Political Attitudes among New Immigrants and Veteran Israelis
This study analyses the antecedents of exclusionist political attitudes towards Palestinian citizens of Israel among Israeli immigrants from the former Soviet Union in comparison to Old Jewish Israelis (OJI). A large-scale study of exclusionist political attitudes was conducted in the face of ongoing terrorism in Israel through telephone surveys carried out in September 2003 with 641 OJI and 131 immigrants. The main goal of the survey was to esti…
Socio-Psychological Barriers to Peace Making
The present article describes the socio–psychological barriers that play a major role in Israeli Jewish society in the attempts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict peacefully. After presenting the general conceptual framework of the socio–psychological barriers, our analysis of Israeli Jewish society focuses on two main aspects: conflict-supporting beliefs that provide well-based arguments that feed the continuation of the conflict, and e…
Intergroup anger in intractable conflict
Anger is one of the most common and destructive emotions in intergroup conflicts, frequently leading to an escalation of intergroup aggression. Prior research has focused on short-term antecedents of intergroup anger, typically using laboratory paradigms. We hypothesized that the long-term sentiment of anger (a broad predisposition that is unrelated to a particular action) would predict subsequent anger responses to provocation. We further hypoth…
The positive effect of negative emotions in protracted conflict
Socio-psychological implications for an occupying society
Although prolonged occupation of a nation is no longer a common phenomenon, where it does exist, it bears harsh implications for all parties involved. This article examines the socio-psychological implications of occupation on the occupying society, using the case of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967 as an example. The article first delineates the concept of occupation from a socio-ps…
Promoting the Middle East Peace Process by Changing Beliefs About Group Malleability
A belief that the beliefs of other groups are changeable rather than fixed is conducive to negotiation.
Emotion regulation in violent conflict
It is well known that negative intergroup emotions such as anger, fear, and hatred play a major role in initiating and maintaining intergroup conflicts. It is far less clear, however, what factors promote the resolution of intergroup conflicts. Using an emotion regulation- framework, we hypothesised that one form of emotion regulation-namely cognitive reappraisal-should play a salutary role in such conflicts, and be associated with increased hope…
Emotional barriers to peace
It is well-established today that the psychological barrier is one of the most prominent factors operating against efforts to promote peace. However, most studies along these lines have concentrated on the cognitive barriers and neglected the emotional ones. Hence, the main goal of this study is to create a deeper understanding of how emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and hatred) directed toward an adversary serve as a barrier to potential public supp…
Anger, Hatred, and the Quest for Peace
Anger is often viewed as a destructive force in intergroup conflicts because of its links to aggressive behavior. The authors hypothesized, however, that anger should have constructive effects in those with low levels of hatred toward the out-group. Using experimental designs with subsamples of nationwide representative surveys, the authors conducted two studies within the context of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict. Study 1 showed that inducing …
Affirmation, acknowledgment of in-group responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures
Socio-psychological barriers to peace making
Socio-psychological barriers play a major role in the continuation of intractable conflicts. They are responsible for the socio-psychological closure that resists and prevents the entertainment of alternative information that could potentially facilitate the acceptance of ideas advancing peacemaking processes. In an attempt to validate a process model that depicts the functioning of the socio-psychological barriers to conflict resolution, an empi…
Ethos of conflict
Can Emotion Regulation Change Political Attitudes in Intractable Conflicts? From the Laboratory to the Field
We hypothesized that an adaptive form of emotion regulation— cognitive reappraisal—would decrease negative emotion and increase support for conflict-resolution policies. In Study 1, Israeli participants were invited to a laboratory session in which they were randomly assigned to either a cognitive-reappraisal condition or a control condition; they were then presented with anger-inducing information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Par…
The Psychology of Intractable Conflicts
The chapter, focusing on the macro-level psychological analysis, aims to describe the unique nature of intractable conflicts and delineate their major societal emotional-cognitive-behavioral processes, as well as the evolved sociopsychological repertoire that fuels them, and the processes that are involved in resolving them peacefully. This goal is achieved by analyzing the course of intractable conflict and its peaceful resolution via its three …
Psychology (131 works) · Social Psychology (126 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (118 works) · Political science (88 works) · Social Psychology (79 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (69 works) · Law (56 works) · Politics (54 works) · Sociology (45 works) · Law (37 works)