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Throughout the course of scholarly history, some concepts have been notoriously hard to define. The 'common good' is one such concept. While the common good has a long and contested scholarly history, social psychology research on folk theories – lay beliefs that represent an individual's informal and subjective understanding of the world – may provide a key for unlocking this nebulous concept. In the current paper, we analysed lay definitions of the common good using the linguistic inquiry and word count's meaning extraction method. From a nationally representative Australian sample of open‐ended text responses (n = 14,303), we uncovered a consistent conceptual structure, with nine themes corresponding to three core aspects: (i) outcomes and objects, (ii) principles and processes and (iii) stakeholders and beneficiaries. From this, we developed a working definition of the folk concept of the common good: 'achieving the best possible outcome for the largest number of people, which is underpinned by decision‐making that is ethically and morally sound and varies by the context in which the decisions are made'. A working definition benefits the academic community and society more broadly, particularly when diverse stakeholders come together to act for the common good to address shared challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social categories hold a steadfast place within social psychological research and theory. Reflecting on the use of social categories in everyday life as well as social psychological research and theory, this article critically interrogates the privileging of hegemonic Western ways of categorizing, addressing and locating people over how they are read and categorized in other socio‐cultural contexts. This article draws on four excerpts of women narrating experiences of being called White, Oborɔnyi or mzungu (engl. foreigner, wanderer, White person) during their travels to the African continent. The article first excavates, phenomenologically, the precariousness of being addressed as White, Oborɔnyi or mzungu. Next, a reflexive account is presented to contemplate how racialization happens in and through the research process. By bringing together phenomenological interpretation and reflexivity, the article explores the limits of researcher and researched positionality in making sense of White as a precarious address, and argues for a view that the meaning of White is established in a four‐way conversation between interviewee, African Other, interviewer and our own culture‐specific inner eyes. The article thus advocates for scholars to give more attention to how our inner eyes limit how we name, describe and theorize our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study augmented the Prototype Willingness Model (PWM) to assess reactive and deliberative decision‐making underpinning bystander intervention in gender‐based violence contexts. There were 2079 participants (50% male, 49% female, and 1% unreported), aged 11–15 years old (M = 12.32, SD = 0.91), attending 19 secondary schools across Scotland. Participants self‐reported the augmented PWM variables, then their intervention behaviour approximately 1 month later. Path analyses mostly supported the predicted relationships between positive and negative bidimensional attitudes, subjective norms, prototype perceptions, perceived behavioural control, and self‐efficacy on intentions and willingness. Willingness predicted positive (speaking with a teacher) and negative (doing nothing) intervention in less serious violence. Self‐efficacy predicted negative intervention in more serious violence. Subjective norms positively moderated the attitudes–intentions relationship. Overall, the results suggested that reactive (willingness) more so than deliberative (intention) decision‐making account for intervention when young people witness gender‐based violence. Additionally, the findings highlight the complexity of bystander intervention decision‐making, where adding control perceptions, bidimensional attitudes, and moderators have independent contributions. Furthermore, self‐comparison to the typical bystander who positively intervenes (prototype perceptions) was the strongest predictor of intentions and willingness, highlighting in a novel way the importance of image and group membership on decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the conformity and obedience studies of Asch and Milgram, legitimate authority is defined as a form of power to which subjects submit irrationally. This view assumes a causative process which the subjects' behaviour is said to manifest. Furthermore, this view assumes that there is illegitimate (or malevolent) authority. Carl J. Friedrich's theory of authority as reasoned elaboration offers an alternative perspective, which reveals conceptual differences between authority and such related constructs as power and legitimacy. When these concepts are properly distinguished, a re‐interpretation of the classical studies of conformity and obedience is called forth. Such an exercise produces insights into some of the discipline's most controversial, if not disturbing, results. Specifically, it leads to an understanding of laboratory conformity and obedience in rational terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has suggested that disgust sensitivity contributes to moral self‐regulation. The relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity is frequently explored as a moderator of moral‐regulating ideologies, such as conservative and traditional ideologies. However, religiosity is suggested to differ from these in moral attitudes against social dominance and racial prejudice. Psychological theories, such as the societal moral intuition and the evolved hazard‐perception models, have proposed that there could be reasons to support a distinct relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. These reasons relate to the intuitive pursuit of spiritual purity and the non‐secular transcendental emotional‐reward value of moral behaviour for religious individuals. In the present manuscript, we conducted the first dedicated meta‐analytic review between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. We analysed a summary of forty‐seven experimental outcomes, including 48,971 participants. Our analysis revealed a significant positive association (r =.25) between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. This outcome suggests that sensitivity to disgust could have distinct spiritual purity and moral self‐regulatory response value for religious individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although resilience is a multi‐level process, research largely focuses on the individual and little is known about how resilience may distinctly present at the group level. Even less is known about subjective conceptualizations of resilience at either level. Therefore, two studies sought to better understand how individuals conceptualize resilience both as an individual and as a group. Study 1 (N = 123) experimentally manipulated whether participants reported on either individual or group‐based responses to real stressors and analysed their qualitative responses. For individual responses, subjective resilience featured active coping most prominently, whereas social support was the focus for group‐based responses. As these differences might be attributable to the different stressors people remembered in either condition, Study 2 (N = 171) held a hypothetical stressor (i.e., natural disaster) constant. As expected, resilience at the group level emphasized maintaining group cohesion. Surprisingly, the group condition also reported increased likelihood to engage in blame, denial, and behavioural disengagement. Contrary to expectations, participants in the individual condition reported stronger desire to seek out new groups. The combined findings are discussed within the framework of resilience and social identity and highlight the necessity of accounting for multiple levels and subjective conceptualizations of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]