Social Psychology

Social psychology is dedicated to the study of how individuals think, feel and behave in their social environment. By social environment, we mean individual other people, groups of people, but also society as a whole. From a systemic perspective, individuals therefore always represent a social environment for other individuals. This means that individuals are influenced by their social environment and have an impact on their social environment. Typical topics of social psychology are, for example, the formation of social identity, social perception (e.g. stereotyping), norms, interpersonal relationships, dynamics within groups and phenomena between groups (e.g. attitudes including prejudice and discrimination). In this way, social psychology contributes to the understanding of social processes and interpersonal relationships.

At the University of Kassel, we are currently focusing on research into the following topics:

• Social psychology of gender and sexuality (e.g. masculinity/femininity, threats to masculinity/femininity, sexual orientation, online dating)
• Expression and perception of social identity through verbal and non-verbal signals (e.g. phonetics, morphosyntax, pragmatics, faces, clothing)
• Association between personality and deception in different social contexts (e.g. in romantic relationships)
• Detection of lies and truth