Steve Reicher
Biographic Data
| ID | 3734800 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve Reicher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve |
| FAMILY NAME | Reicher |
| SIGNATURE | REICHER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 429 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Open science communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect between evidence and policy. In the United Kingdom, concerns about the secrecy that initially surrounded…
Multiple perspectives in conflict settings
In this introduction to the special thematic section, we discuss the pre-eminent research orientation in the social and political psychology of peace and conflict, its current critiques, and what more multiple perspectives can add to the field. First, we outline key characteristics of the ‘simple road’ to conflict settings: a simple, often binary, definition of the sides involved, a focus on one conflict-induced negative outcome and on one causal…
On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action
Theoretical perspectives that give primacy to ideological or structural determinism have dominated criminological analysis of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This paper provides an alternative social psychological perspective through detailed empirical analysis of two of these riots. We utilize novel forms of data to build triangulated accounts of the nature of the events and explore the perspectives of participants. We assert these riots cannot be ade…
I know who I am, but who do they think I am? Muslim perspectives on encounters with airport authorities
In this paper we report an analysis of individual and group interviews with thirty-eight Scottish Muslims concerning their encounters with authority - especially those at airports. Our analysis shows that a key theme in interviewees' talk of their experience in this context concerns the denial and misrecognition of valued identities such as being British, being respectable and being Muslim. One reason why such experiences are so problematic conce…
Identity, Culture and Contestation
The Nature of Collective Resilience
Accounts from over 90 survivors and 56 witnesses of the 2005 London bombings were analysed to determine the relative prevalence of mass behaviors associated with either psychosocial vulnerability (e.g. ‘selfishness’, mass panic) or collective resilience (e.g. help, unity). ‘Selfish’ behaviors were found to be rare; mutual helping was more common. There is evidence for (a) a perceived continued danger of death after the explosions; (b) a sense of …
Collective Psychological Empowerment as a Model of Social Change
The issue of psychological empowerment in crowd events has important implications for both theory and practice. Theoretically, the issue throws light on both intergroup conflict and the nature and functions of social identity. Practically, empowerment in collective events can feed into societal change. The study of empowerment therefore tells us something about how the forces pressing for such change might succeed or fail. The present article fir…
Everyone for themselves? A comparative study of crowd solidarity among emergency survivors
Crowd behaviour in emergencies has previously been explained in terms of either 'mass panic' or strength of pre-existing social bonds. The present paper reports results from a study comparing high- versus low-identification emergency mass emergency survivors to test the interlinked claims (1) that shared identity in an emergency crowd enhances expressions of solidarity and reduces 'panic' behaviour and (2) that such a shared identity can arise fr…
Helping to Improve the Group Stereotype
Three studies consider a basis for intergroup helping. Specifically, they show that group members may help others to disconfirm a stereotype of their own group as mean. Study 1 shows that Scots believe they are seen as mean by the English, resent this stereotype, are motivated to refute it, and believe out-group helping is a particularly effective way of doing so. Study 2 shows that increasing the salience of the English stereotype of the Scottis…
Young People's Deliberations on Geographic Mobility
This paper considers how social identities may shape group members' spatial behaviour. Specifically, it reports a small‐scale interview study (n = 30) conducted with young people (17 years of age) living in a Scottish town close to a national border (with England). This border has very little physical presence. However, the psychological significance of a Scottish identification remains strong, and we investigate the ways in which national identi…
VI. Identity and Social Change
The term ‘politics’ has wide-ranging referents. However, broadly construed it refers to processes whereby the social relations that determine our conditions of existence are produced, reproduced, and transformed. These processes operate at any number of levels from the (very) local to the global. A fully explicated analysis requires several levels of explanation and it would be folly for psychology to seek to supplant other disciplines’ investiga…
Explaining enduring empowerment
An ethnographic study of two crowd events was carried out in order to develop a hypothesis about the experience of empowerment in collective action. Qualitative comparison of an anti-roads occupation and a mass eviction suggests that empowerment as an outcome of collective action is a function of the extent to which one's own action is understood as expressing social identity, a process we term collective self-objectification. The comparison indi…
Transforming the boundaries of collective identity
This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformati…
Self and Nation
The National Question Psychology and Nationhood Nation and Mobilization National Identity and International Relations In Quest of National Character Lessons in National History Representing the National Community Changing Categories and Changing Contexts Nationalist Psychology and the Psychology of Nationhood
Collective action and psychological change
The study comprises an analysis of processes of psychological change among participants at an environmental protest. A participant observation study found evidence of a radicalized self concept among a number of crowd members, and indicates a link between radicalization, an asymmetry of categorical representations between protesters and the police, and the subsequent interaction premised on these divergent representations. The analysis supports a…
Identity, Argument and Schism
This paper presents evidence from two studies which bears upon a social psychological approach to schisms. The two studies both relate to the split in the Church of England over the ordination of women and were conducted over the period when the first women became priests. The first is a qualitative study of leading proponents and opponents of the change. It is shown that, first, the Pros and Antis have differing constructions of the nature of th…
The Intergroup Dynamics of Collective Empowerment
Recent accounts of collective action highlight the importance of psychological empowerment, but conceptualize it simply as a precondition for such action. By contrast, the social identity model (Reicher, 1996, 1997; Stott, 1996) suggests that empowerment is a product as well as a precondition of collective action. However, existing research on the social identity model has merely inferred the emergence of feelings of power rather than shown it em…
How Conflict Escalates
In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrated on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on the nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' perspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalises during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originates, and the form that it takes…
Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action
This paper seeks to contribute toward an integrated approach to social movement mobilization. It does so through considering how a social psychological account of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied to the mobilization rhetoric of social movements. More specifically it argues that as people may define themselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhet…
Constructing Women's Psychological Health in Anti-Abortion Rhetoric
This paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project. In particular we examine how the psychological concept of 'denial' contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of 'Post-Abortion Syndrome' allows anti-abortionists to 'psychologise' and therefore undermine alternative constructio…
Particular methods and general assumptions
Anti-abortion propaganda
This paper presents a detailed examination of a speech made by the anti-abortion MP David Alton to a group of health-care workers in the period immediately before the parliamentary debates concerning the 1990 Warnock Embryology bill. It is intended to illustrate and examine some of the strategic subileties to anti-absortion propaganda and so contribute to strategies of resistance and counter argumentation
Explaining enduring empowerment
An ethnographic study of two crowd events was carried out in order to develop a hypothesis about the experience of empowerment in collective action. Qualitative comparison of an anti-roads occupation and a mass eviction suggests that empowerment as an outcome of collective action is a function of the extent to which one's own action is understood as expressing social identity, a process we term collective self-objectification. The comparison indi…
The Intergroup Dynamics of Collective Empowerment
Recent accounts of collective action highlight the importance of psychological empowerment, but conceptualize it simply as a precondition for such action. By contrast, the social identity model (Reicher, 1996, 1997; Stott, 1996) suggests that empowerment is a product as well as a precondition of collective action. However, existing research on the social identity model has merely inferred the emergence of feelings of power rather than shown it em…
Collective Psychological Empowerment as a Model of Social Change
The issue of psychological empowerment in crowd events has important implications for both theory and practice. Theoretically, the issue throws light on both intergroup conflict and the nature and functions of social identity. Practically, empowerment in collective events can feed into societal change. The study of empowerment therefore tells us something about how the forces pressing for such change might succeed or fail. The present article fir…
I know who I am, but who do they think I am? Muslim perspectives on encounters with airport authorities
In this paper we report an analysis of individual and group interviews with thirty-eight Scottish Muslims concerning their encounters with authority - especially those at airports. Our analysis shows that a key theme in interviewees' talk of their experience in this context concerns the denial and misrecognition of valued identities such as being British, being respectable and being Muslim. One reason why such experiences are so problematic conce…
How Conflict Escalates
In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrated on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on the nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' perspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalises during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originates, and the form that it takes…
Transforming the boundaries of collective identity
This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformati…
Identity, Argument and Schism
This paper presents evidence from two studies which bears upon a social psychological approach to schisms. The two studies both relate to the split in the Church of England over the ordination of women and were conducted over the period when the first women became priests. The first is a qualitative study of leading proponents and opponents of the change. It is shown that, first, the Pros and Antis have differing constructions of the nature of th…
Young People's Deliberations on Geographic Mobility
This paper considers how social identities may shape group members' spatial behaviour. Specifically, it reports a small‐scale interview study (n = 30) conducted with young people (17 years of age) living in a Scottish town close to a national border (with England). This border has very little physical presence. However, the psychological significance of a Scottish identification remains strong, and we investigate the ways in which national identi…
Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action
This paper seeks to contribute toward an integrated approach to social movement mobilization. It does so through considering how a social psychological account of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied to the mobilization rhetoric of social movements. More specifically it argues that as people may define themselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhet…
On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action
Theoretical perspectives that give primacy to ideological or structural determinism have dominated criminological analysis of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This paper provides an alternative social psychological perspective through detailed empirical analysis of two of these riots. We utilize novel forms of data to build triangulated accounts of the nature of the events and explore the perspectives of participants. We assert these riots cannot be ade…
Multiple perspectives in conflict settings
In this introduction to the special thematic section, we discuss the pre-eminent research orientation in the social and political psychology of peace and conflict, its current critiques, and what more multiple perspectives can add to the field. First, we outline key characteristics of the ‘simple road’ to conflict settings: a simple, often binary, definition of the sides involved, a focus on one conflict-induced negative outcome and on one causal…
Constructing Women's Psychological Health in Anti-Abortion Rhetoric
This paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project. In particular we examine how the psychological concept of 'denial' contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of 'Post-Abortion Syndrome' allows anti-abortionists to 'psychologise' and therefore undermine alternative constructio…
VI. Identity and Social Change
The term ‘politics’ has wide-ranging referents. However, broadly construed it refers to processes whereby the social relations that determine our conditions of existence are produced, reproduced, and transformed. These processes operate at any number of levels from the (very) local to the global. A fully explicated analysis requires several levels of explanation and it would be folly for psychology to seek to supplant other disciplines’ investiga…
Anti-abortion propaganda
This paper presents a detailed examination of a speech made by the anti-abortion MP David Alton to a group of health-care workers in the period immediately before the parliamentary debates concerning the 1990 Warnock Embryology bill. It is intended to illustrate and examine some of the strategic subileties to anti-absortion propaganda and so contribute to strategies of resistance and counter argumentation
Anti-abortion propaganda
This paper presents a detailed examination of a speech made by the anti-abortion MP David Alton to a group of health-care workers in the period immediately before the parliamentary debates concerning the 1990 Warnock Embryology bill. It is intended to illustrate and examine some of the strategic subileties to anti-absortion propaganda and so contribute to strategies of resistance and counter argumentation
Particular methods and general assumptions
Constructing Women's Psychological Health in Anti-Abortion Rhetoric
This paper considers the ways in which anti-abortion activists construct women's psychological experience of abortion and explores the rhetorical significance of this discourse in advancing the anti-abortion project. In particular we examine how the psychological concept of 'denial' contained in the (proposed) diagnostic category of 'Post-Abortion Syndrome' allows anti-abortionists to 'psychologise' and therefore undermine alternative constructio…
Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action
This paper seeks to contribute toward an integrated approach to social movement mobilization. It does so through considering how a social psychological account of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied to the mobilization rhetoric of social movements. More specifically it argues that as people may define themselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhet…
How Conflict Escalates
In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrated on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on the nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' perspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalises during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originates, and the form that it takes…
Identity, Argument and Schism
This paper presents evidence from two studies which bears upon a social psychological approach to schisms. The two studies both relate to the split in the Church of England over the ordination of women and were conducted over the period when the first women became priests. The first is a qualitative study of leading proponents and opponents of the change. It is shown that, first, the Pros and Antis have differing constructions of the nature of th…
The Intergroup Dynamics of Collective Empowerment
Recent accounts of collective action highlight the importance of psychological empowerment, but conceptualize it simply as a precondition for such action. By contrast, the social identity model (Reicher, 1996, 1997; Stott, 1996) suggests that empowerment is a product as well as a precondition of collective action. However, existing research on the social identity model has merely inferred the emergence of feelings of power rather than shown it em…
Collective action and psychological change
The study comprises an analysis of processes of psychological change among participants at an environmental protest. A participant observation study found evidence of a radicalized self concept among a number of crowd members, and indicates a link between radicalization, an asymmetry of categorical representations between protesters and the police, and the subsequent interaction premised on these divergent representations. The analysis supports a…
Self and Nation
The National Question Psychology and Nationhood Nation and Mobilization National Identity and International Relations In Quest of National Character Lessons in National History Representing the National Community Changing Categories and Changing Contexts Nationalist Psychology and the Psychology of Nationhood
Transforming the boundaries of collective identity
This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformati…
VI. Identity and Social Change
The term ‘politics’ has wide-ranging referents. However, broadly construed it refers to processes whereby the social relations that determine our conditions of existence are produced, reproduced, and transformed. These processes operate at any number of levels from the (very) local to the global. A fully explicated analysis requires several levels of explanation and it would be folly for psychology to seek to supplant other disciplines’ investiga…
Explaining enduring empowerment
An ethnographic study of two crowd events was carried out in order to develop a hypothesis about the experience of empowerment in collective action. Qualitative comparison of an anti-roads occupation and a mass eviction suggests that empowerment as an outcome of collective action is a function of the extent to which one's own action is understood as expressing social identity, a process we term collective self-objectification. The comparison indi…
Young People's Deliberations on Geographic Mobility
This paper considers how social identities may shape group members' spatial behaviour. Specifically, it reports a small‐scale interview study (n = 30) conducted with young people (17 years of age) living in a Scottish town close to a national border (with England). This border has very little physical presence. However, the psychological significance of a Scottish identification remains strong, and we investigate the ways in which national identi…
Helping to Improve the Group Stereotype
Three studies consider a basis for intergroup helping. Specifically, they show that group members may help others to disconfirm a stereotype of their own group as mean. Study 1 shows that Scots believe they are seen as mean by the English, resent this stereotype, are motivated to refute it, and believe out-group helping is a particularly effective way of doing so. Study 2 shows that increasing the salience of the English stereotype of the Scottis…
Everyone for themselves? A comparative study of crowd solidarity among emergency survivors
Crowd behaviour in emergencies has previously been explained in terms of either 'mass panic' or strength of pre-existing social bonds. The present paper reports results from a study comparing high- versus low-identification emergency mass emergency survivors to test the interlinked claims (1) that shared identity in an emergency crowd enhances expressions of solidarity and reduces 'panic' behaviour and (2) that such a shared identity can arise fr…
The Nature of Collective Resilience
Accounts from over 90 survivors and 56 witnesses of the 2005 London bombings were analysed to determine the relative prevalence of mass behaviors associated with either psychosocial vulnerability (e.g. ‘selfishness’, mass panic) or collective resilience (e.g. help, unity). ‘Selfish’ behaviors were found to be rare; mutual helping was more common. There is evidence for (a) a perceived continued danger of death after the explosions; (b) a sense of …
Collective Psychological Empowerment as a Model of Social Change
The issue of psychological empowerment in crowd events has important implications for both theory and practice. Theoretically, the issue throws light on both intergroup conflict and the nature and functions of social identity. Practically, empowerment in collective events can feed into societal change. The study of empowerment therefore tells us something about how the forces pressing for such change might succeed or fail. The present article fir…
Identity, Culture and Contestation
I know who I am, but who do they think I am? Muslim perspectives on encounters with airport authorities
In this paper we report an analysis of individual and group interviews with thirty-eight Scottish Muslims concerning their encounters with authority - especially those at airports. Our analysis shows that a key theme in interviewees' talk of their experience in this context concerns the denial and misrecognition of valued identities such as being British, being respectable and being Muslim. One reason why such experiences are so problematic conce…
On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action
Theoretical perspectives that give primacy to ideological or structural determinism have dominated criminological analysis of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This paper provides an alternative social psychological perspective through detailed empirical analysis of two of these riots. We utilize novel forms of data to build triangulated accounts of the nature of the events and explore the perspectives of participants. We assert these riots cannot be ade…
Multiple perspectives in conflict settings
In this introduction to the special thematic section, we discuss the pre-eminent research orientation in the social and political psychology of peace and conflict, its current critiques, and what more multiple perspectives can add to the field. First, we outline key characteristics of the ‘simple road’ to conflict settings: a simple, often binary, definition of the sides involved, a focus on one conflict-induced negative outcome and on one causal…
Open science communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect between evidence and policy. In the United Kingdom, concerns about the secrecy that initially surrounded…
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Law (11 works) · Social group (10 works) · Social identity theory (10 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)