Dr. Lickel’s research examines adaptive and maladaptive responses to threat, particularly related to fears of terrorism and to environmental risks. With his collaborators and graduate students, Dr. Lickel is currently conducting several lines of research.
These include:
- Understanding what makes communities resilient to environmental threats. This work includes cross-national data collection in Chile and the U.S., and both nationally representative and community-level samples.
- Investigating how people respond to migration, particularly when migrants are victims of environmental disasters or civil conflicts.
- Studying the role of different forms of activism and protest movements for adaptive change in response to political and environmental threats.
- Testing the role of values and emotion in personal and societal change.
- Understanding human responses to artificial intelligence and social robots, including developing normative guidelines for ethical technological development.
Endowed University Chair in Peace Psychology
Director, Psychology of Peace and Violence Program
For nearly three decades, Tropp has studied how members of diverse groups experience contact with each other, and how differences in status and power affect cross-group relations, with a dual emphasis on improving relations between groups while achieving ever-greater levels of equality and justice. She has published more than 120 papers, and her influential meta-analysis of intergroup contact effects (co-authored with Thomas Pettigrew) has been cited more than 12,000 times . In recognition of her contributions to the research literature, she has received some of her discipline’s most prestigious awards, including the Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Nevitt Sanford Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, among others. She has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, along with receiving the Distinguished Academic Outreach in Research Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Tropp is coauthor of When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (with Thomas Pettigrew) and editor of several books, including Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations , the Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, and Making Research Matter: A Psychologist’s Guide to Public Engagement.
Tropp has been a visiting scholar and delivered workshops and seminars at many global institutions, including the National Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (New Zealand), the Kurt Lewin Institute (Netherlands), the Marburg Center for Conflict Studies (Germany), Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile), the University of Sussex (UK), the University of Leuven (Belgium), and the International Graduate College on Conflict and Cooperation (Germany, UK, Belgium).
Over the course of her career, Tropp has collaborated with a vast range of U.S.-based organizations to improve relations between groups and promote greater social integration, equity, inclusion, and belonging across racial, ethnic, political and religious divides. Tropp has also worked closely with practitioners, community partners, civil society, and nongovernmental organizations to evaluate interventions that seek to bridge divides and promote more peaceful relations between groups. In recent years, she partnered with the International Organization for Migration (IOM, the UN’s Migration Agency) to provide training and develop resources to enhance the effectiveness of social mixing programs. With IOM and with the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, she and her graduate students have also evaluated the effectiveness of contact-based interventions in divided societies such as Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda.
Founding Director, Psychology of Peace and Violence Program
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) and his more recent book: The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil: Inclusive Caring, Moral Courage, Altruism Born of Suffering, Active Bystandership and Heroism (Oxford University Press, 2015)
Dr. Staub has extensively studied the roots of violence between groups, especially mass killings, genocide, and terrorism. He has also studied violence prevention and reconciliation after violence.. 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 (1992); 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. His work has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and other foundations and organizations.