Research Themes

Our research asks how people come to identify with groups, how those identifications shape what they believe about others, and when they translate into speaking out or staying silent. We work across three themes, using experimental, survey, qualitative, and meta-analytic methods. Türkiye forms the background to these themes, as a setting whose ethnic, religious, and political complexity makes it a demanding test case for theories developed elsewhere.

Theme 1: Social Identity, Group Norms, Intergroup Relations, and Collective Action

Why do people favor their own group, and what makes them push back against it instead? This theme examines identification as a driver of intergroup bias, and group norms as the condition that turns identification into conformity or into dissent. Our work on the normative conflict model asks when loyalty to a group requires opposing it, and our work on collective action asks what moves group members from grievance to mobilization --including collective memory among Alevis, group-based resources among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria, and bystander support for climate action. Methodologically the theme runs from experiments on norm manipulation to meta-analytic synthesis of the identification-differentiation relationship.

Theme 2: Ideology, Prejudice, and Political Psychology in Türkiye

This theme traces how ideological orientations form and what they predict. We examine right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, worldviews, and moral foundations as antecedents of generalized prejudice, and test how well models built on Western samples travel to a context where the relevant cleavages are ethnic, sectarian, and religious rather than racial. A second strand concerns collective memory and repair: how national identity is constructed through historical narrative, what Turks are willing to acknowledge about past wrongdoing toward Kurds and Armenians, and what makes intergroup forgiveness possible. Morality runs through the theme as an explanatory lens: moral foundations, moral disengagement, and moral exclusion as mechanisms linking ideology to how outgroups are treated.

Theme 3: Gender, Marginalization, Silencing, and Resistance

This theme asks who gets to speak, who learns not to, and what turns silence into voice. We study self-silencing among people whose identities carry social cost, such as Circassians in Türkiye, LGB+ individuals negotiating heterosexism, and the psychological toll that concealment exacts. A second strand examines gender as a system of constraint: masculinity ideology and threatened manhood as precursors of violence against women, prejudice toward trans people, and the sexist language practices that sustain gender hierarchy. A third addresses resistance: how feminist identity is claimed or refused, what sustains solidarity across differently marginalized groups, and how misogynist online ideologies form. Across all three, the question is the relationship between marginalization and collective voice.