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Faculty |
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Core Faculty of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program include Dr. Linda Tropp, Dr. Brian Lickel, Dr. Ervin Staub (Emeritus) ___________________________________ Dr. Linda Tropp, Associate Professor and Director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program, holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2000).
Dr. Tropp’s research focuses on expectations and outcomes of intergroup contact, identification with social groups, interpretations of intergroup relationships, and responses to prejudice and disadvantage. She has published in a wide range of psychology journals, including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Psychological Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. Dr. Tropp co-edited a volume of the Journal of Social Issues concerning the integration of research and practice in intergroup relations (2006), along with a book on approaches to improving intergroup relations (2008). Dr. Tropp received the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues for her research on intergroup contact, the Erikson Early Career Award for distinguished research contributions from the International Society of Political Psychology, and the McKeachie Early Career Teaching Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Conflict Studies at Phillips Universität Marburg and the International Graduate College Conflict and Cooperation at Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena (Germany), as well as at the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). Dr. Tropp has also been
actively engaged in many efforts to integrate contributions from
researchers and practitioners to improve intergroup relations.
She has collaborated with several national organizations to present
social science evidence in Supreme Court cases on racial desegregation,
and she has worked on state initiatives designed to improve interracial
relations in schools. She is currently a member of the Joint
Learning Initiative on Children and Ethnic Diversity, an international,
interdisciplinary network of researchers, policymakers, and
practitioners working to reduce racial and ethnic divisions and build
social inclusive communities through effective early childhood
education programs. ___________________________________
Dr. Brian
Lickel, Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. from the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000, and he joined the
University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty in September 2008.
Dr. Lickel's research examines
issues of collective responsibility, such as what causes people to
blame all members of a group for the actions of one (or a subset) of
group members, and how judgments of collective responsibility are used
to justify retribution against those groups. He is currently engaged in
a number of international collaborations to examine how perceptions of
collective responsibility, beliefs about blame, and support for
retribution manifest themselves in ongoing ethnopolitical conflicts
(e.g., relations between the indigenous Mapuche community and the
larger Chilean population, American and British reactions to the
occupation of Iraq). More broadly, he seeks to further expand his
international and interdisciplinary collaborations to specify
mechanisms that can facilitate the resolution of ethnopolitical
conflicts in many different parts of the world. Dr. Brian
Lickel's CV Dr. Bernhard Leidner, Assistant Professor, received his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2010.
Dr. Leidner joined UMass Amherst in the summer 2011. His research focuses on processes of social identification and intergroup relations, primarily in the context of large social categories such as nations and ethnic groups. Specifically, his research is at the cross-road of the social psychological areas of norms and morality (e.g., moral disengagement in response to ingroup wrongdoings), intergroup threat (e.g., threat-induced shifting of moral principles such as fairness or loyalty), and social justice (e.g., reparations after ingroup wrongdoings; conflict resolution). Some of the topics Dr. Leidner investigated/s include: reactions to ingroup-committed torture; American justice appraisals after atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan; reconciliation strategies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is currently interested in the search and need for meaning as motives for human 'warlikeness' and peacefulness. ___________________________________ Dr. Ervin Staub, Professor Emeritus and Founding Director, holds a doctorate in psychology from Stanford University (1965).
Dr. Staub has been president of the International Society of Political Psychology as well as the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence (Division 48 of the American Psychological Association). From the latter organization, he received the "Award for life-long contributions to peace psychology." Dr. Staub has published numerous articles and chapters on helping behavior and altruism, the passivity of bystanders in the face of others' need, the development of caring, and ways to reduce aggression in children. Included among his extensive writings is the influential, Psychology of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Dr. Staub studies the roots of violence between groups, especially mass killings, genocide, and terrorism. He has also studied reconciliation after violence and its prevention. Dr. Staub has applied his work in numerous real world settings. For example, he created a training program for California police officers in the wake of the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles; he also worked in Massachusetts schools on a project assessing bullying and school climate in an effort to promote more caring schools. Dr. Staub has been involved in a number of projects designed to promote "healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation" in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide just over a decade ago. This work has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and others. ___________________________________ |
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