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Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Gordon Sammut reports was provided by University of Malta. Gordon Sammut reports a relationship with University of Malta that includes: employment. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

In today's ideologically diverse world, it is pertinent to have a better understanding of how our beliefs of the social world shape our thinking and behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key social values that underlie particular sets of beliefs, referred to here as worldviews. Worldviews encompass beliefs that shape one's outlook on life and are, therefore, instrumental in providing meaning to one's reality and one's understanding as to how one fits in it. They can be classified into five unique types, namely, Localised, Orthodox, Pragmatist, Reward, and Survivor. In this paper we start by proposing a theoretical relationship between this five-factor typology and social values. Following this, we present findings that show that worldviews may be mapped onto the two higher order value dimensions of Openness to Change versus Conservation, and Self-transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. We conclude by outlining the implications that these findings have on understanding individual cognition and society in general., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Mifsud, Sammut. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Mass protests that have taken place over the past decade in various Western democracies have called into question the role of police in society, as officers have employed measures to contain rallies protesting for or against various issues. A number of these protests have resorted to violent means, resisting the police or protesting directly against their role and methods. The present study sought to investigate the prototypical representations of the police that lay citizens use to forge or desist identification with police officers. Social identification enables citizens to consider the police as ingroup members, facilitating respect for their authority. Conversely, identifying the police as outgroup precipitates resistance. The study involved 41 in-depth interviews carried out with citizens of Malta between May and June 2020. Thematic Networks Analysis revealed various points of consensus as well as a number of controversial themes. In particular, respondents demonstrated sceptical attitudes regarding policing on the beat for fear of overfamiliarity, rooted in introspective attributions projected at the police as merely human. Moreover, respondents expressed support for technological innovations that overcome natural psychological tendencies. The findings of this study suggest that seeking increasing trust in the police may be a red herring for policymakers. Rather, efforts should be directed at developing inter-objective systems, (e.g. body-cams), that overcome individual psychological propensities., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

We studied the role of worldviews in the endorsement of proposals for the legalisation of recreational cannabis. Drawing on literature on generalised belief structures, we developed categorical measures for five worldviews drawing on commonalities in the typologies reviewed (Orthodox, Localised, Reward, Pragmatist, and Survivor). We proceeded to study the relative influence of worldviews in support of a range of items concerned with the legalisation of recreational cannabis amongst a randomly generated sample ( N = 1000) in Malta. Our findings demonstrate that the Orthodox worldview stands in contrast to all others in opposing the proposals and constitutes the resistance group to legalisation. On the other hand, no other worldview unilaterally supports the proposals albeit these are, on an individual basis, favourably perceived. Our study further demonstrates that proportions of variance accounted for by the worldview measures we adopted are comparable to those exercised by demographic variables demonstrating significance. We propose that the study of worldviews is critical in understanding social and political alliances that come together to support or oppose particular politicised projects or collective courses of action., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Sammut, Mifsud and Brockdorff.)

The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the crucial role of people's compliance for the success of measures designed to protect public health. Within the frame of Semiotic Cultural Psycho-social Theory, we discuss how the analysis of people's ways of making sense of the crisis scenario can help to identify the resources or constraints underlying the ways the citizens evaluate and comply with the anti-covid measures. This study aimed to examine how Italian adults interpreted what was happening in the first wave of the pandemic and how the interpretation varied in the period up to the beginning of the second wave. Diaries were collected for six months, from 11 April to 3 November 2020. Participants were periodically asked to talk about their life 'in the last few weeks'. A total number of 606 diaries were collected. The Automated Method for Content Analysis (ACASM) procedure was applied to the texts to detect the factorial dimensions - interpreted as the markers of latent dimensions of meanings- underpinning (dis)similarities in the respondents' discourses. ANOVA were applied to examine the dissimilarities in the association between factorial dimensions and production time. Findings show that significant transitions occurred over time in the main dimensions of meaning identified. Whereas the first phase was characterized by a focus on one's own daily life and the attempt to make sense of the changes occurring in the personal sphere, in the following phases the socio-economic impact of the crisis was brought to the fore, along with the hope to returning to the "normality" of the pre-rupture scenario. We argued that, despite the differences, a low sense of the interweaving between the personal and public sphere emerged in the accounts of the pandemic crisis throughout the sixth months considered; a split that, we speculate, can explain the "free for all" movement that occurred at the end of the first wave and the beginning of the second wave., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Intergroup relations are of crucial importance in contemporary times, with concerns around social representations, social influence and collective action remaining salient. A core aspect of intergroup conflict revolves around the notion of joint projects, whereby different collectives seek to promote their own project through processes of joint intentionality. Nonetheless, we contend that intergroup relations research can tackle the notion of projects more fruitfully by studying the mutual understandings of projects of groups in conflict. Accordingly, we propose an action-oriented reformulation for intergroup relations research, which is contrasted with the standard object-oriented formula. Object-oriented research either (a) emphasizes the study of social objects without regard for their different construal by members of conflicting groups, or (b) focuses on 'social representations of' the objects in question, without regard for the projects that such representations serve. Contrastingly, action-oriented research (a) seeks to understand a collective's 'social re-presentation for ' a specific project; and (b) studies the social and alternative re-presentation of objects and projects as a systemic product of intergroup relations. We then present illustrative examples of object-oriented research, followed by a study concerning Arab-Maltese relations in Malta as an example of action-oriented research. We end by making recommendations for future research on intergroup relations, with the aim of shedding light on the processes that bind coalitions for collective action., (Copyright © 2020 Buhagiar and Sammut.)

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189885.].

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe; b) a matter of interpersonal bond; c) a caring society; d) consisting of a niche of belongingness; e) a hostile place (others' world). These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios.

Goochani, Ghanian, Baradaran & Azadi's (2017) study provides support for an extension of the theory of planned behaviour through inclusion of the variables of Trust and Perceived Benefits in the determination of attitudes. Considering the fact that the only other direct effect observed in this study is exercised by Subjective Norms, we argue that this new model provides support for the sociocultural determination of attitudes and, by extension, planned behaviour. We argue that understanding behavioural intentions for cultivating Bt rice requires an understanding of the social representations concerning this technology and its regulation in Iran. We further argue that due concern is required regarding the evolution of these representations over time. We conclude by proposing different avenues for future research.

Since its inception, psychology has struggled with issues of conceptualization and operationalization of social-psychological phenomena. The study of social values and points of view has been prone to such difficulties, despite a predominant concern of qualitative distinctions in the variability of both of these phenomena across different individuals and social groups. And while interest in both traces a common origin in Rokeach's studies of narrow mindedness, the study of both phenomena has since proceeded apace. In this study, we posit a renewed reconciliation between the two that is best served through a social-psychological model of points of view in terms of the values that inspire them. We draw on critical linguistics to propose a theoretical and methodological framework that can aid a systematic study of value structures as they take different forms and meanings through particular types of points of view. In five stages of qualitative analysis, the model deconstructs utterances into distinct terms that reveal a predominant perspective-taking style that can be utilized towards the categorization of different points of view, in terms of values that imbue them and that serve to provide them with a coherent angle of constructing a particular narrative., (© 2013 The British Psychological Society.)

Psychological life is subject to the influence of a constructed and potentially reconstituted past, as well as to future anticipated outcomes and expectations. Human behaviour occurs along a temporal trajectory that marks the projects individuals adopt in their quests of human action. Explanations of social behaviour are limited insofar as they exclude a historical concern with human purpose. In this paper, we draw on Bartlett's notion of collective remembering to argue that manifest social relations are rooted in past events that give present behaviours meaning and justification. We further propose an epidemiological time-series framework for social representations, that are conceptualised as evolving over time and that are subject to a 'ratchet effect' that perpetuates meaning in a collective. We argue that understanding forms of social behaviour that draw on lay explanations of social relations requires a deconstructive effort that maps the evolutionary trajectory of a representational project in terms of its adaptation over time. We go on to illustrate our proposal visiting data that emerged in an inquiry investigating Maltese immigrants' perspectives towards their countries of settlement and origin. This data reveals an assimilationist acculturation preference amongst the Maltese in Britain that seems incongruous with the current climate of European integration and Maltese communities in other countries around the world. We demonstrate that a historical concern with regard to this apparent behaviour helps explain how Maltese immigrants to Britain opt for certain forms of intercultural relations than others that are normally preferable. We demonstrate that these preferences rely on an evolved justification of the Maltese getting by with foreign rulers that other scholars have traced back to the medieval practice of chivalry.