Sara Vestergren

Crowds & Identities Feb 2026! Fantastic work by @evangelospsych.bsky.social on Crowds, awe, and ordeal: Experiences, psychological transformations and ideological reproduction. Great seeing everyone! @swedishprotests.bsky.social @dennisnigbur.bsky.social @yarazebian.bsky.social @pjsaaved.bsky.social

And expertly led meeting by @samreenchhabra.bsky.social

1/2 'In social psychology, the current ease of online surveys, vignette experiments and so on only reinforces a point made 20 years ago that studies of "behaviour" are rare compared to studies of self-report....'

Understanding the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK: Three Case Studies The wave of riots in England in summer 2024 were followed by swift policy responses before any detailed empirical investigation had been carried out. This paper presents case studies of the disorders ...

Our study of three of the 2024 anti-asylum-seeker riots now accepted for publication at J of Community & Applied Social Psych.

Link to pre-print below.

www.qeios.com/read/17ASAP

Out now! Handbook of Social Identity Research 🌟 📚

✍ Edited by Nyla Branscombe and Katherine J. Reynolds

'Indispensable for those interested in the research methods and empirical results' – Naomi Ellemers

Read first chapter 🆓: tinyurl.com/mpfkzvjz
ℹ️ More information: tinyurl.com/38ctp2f8

'Beyond the politics of demand: Prefigurative politics and the future of collective action research'

New pre-print from @swedishprotests.bsky.social @metesefauysal.bsky.social and others with important argument about how social psych approaches collective action

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Teaching when to trust As fake news accelerates, we need to teach our children how to think critically. Finnish schools are leading the charge

Finland has emerged as a global leader in countering “fake news”. Here's how they've done it

The Crowds & Identities seminar, expertly convened by @freyamills.bsky.social

@pjsaaved.bsky.social presents his team's important work on public perceptions of police use of force against protests.

Precarious Solidarities: Collective Action during and after disasters Under Authoritarianism or repression | BPS The final instalment of this series, gathering emergency practitioners and researchers in the social psychology field. Time may be subject to change.

The last session in the collective action series hosted by @bps-social-psych.bsky.social and organised by @drselintekin.bsky.social and @merveozturkey.bsky.social is this Thursday 4th Dec 1-3pm GMT.

The webinar is free to attend but registration needed www.bps.org.uk/event/precar...

Precarious Solidarities: Collective Action during and after disasters Under Authoritarianism or repression | BPS The final instalment of this series, gathering emergency practitioners and researchers in the social psychology field. Time may be subject to change.

The last session in the collective action series hosted by @bps-social-psych.bsky.social and organised by @drselintekin.bsky.social and @merveozturkey.bsky.social is this Thursday 4th Dec 1-3pm GMT.

The webinar is free to attend but registration needed www.bps.org.uk/event/precar...

Explaining a collective false alarm: Context and cognition in the Oxford Street crowd flight incident Collective false alarms can cause significant disruption, costly emergency response, and distress. Yet an adequate psychological explanation for these incidents is lacking. We interviewed 39 particip....

It's Black Friday. Eight years ago today, a huge false alarm on Oxford Street was pathologized as a 'stampede' caused by 'mass panic'. We analysed why people mistook a harmless sound for a terrorist attack and why others joined their flight.

@ukri.org funded

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

'Not calling out these politics for what they are can only legitimise them. This is done through euphemism (calling them “populist” for example), by absorbing and mimicking them or accepting them as “legitimate grievances” from “the people”.'

>1600 fossil fuel lobbyists
>300 big agriculture lobbyists
551 carbon capture and storage lobbyists

Are COPs where governments gather to discuss addressing climate change, or where capitalists gather to stop them?

Important new paper shows that mass casualties from extreme heat are likely at the current level of global warming and will only get worse the more the world warms: “mass mortality events remain plausible at near-future temperatures despite current adaptations to heat”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We replicated one of the oldest experiments in Psychology (Triplett, 1898) as a registered report. Children completed a task faster in pairs than when they were alone.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The co-action effect is a thing. But what's the mechanism for this fascinating form of social influence?

I feel 'obliged' to share this again...

There is a 3 one on 4th (if I remember correctly) Dec that you might be able to attend - it will be fab too

From Relief to Resistance: Sustaining Collective Action for Structural Change | BPS The second in a three part event series from the Social Psychology Section, gathering emergency practitioners and researchers in the social psychology field.

Join us for the second free session (of 3) in our Collective Action series today 2-4pm GMT, hosted by @bps-social-psych.bsky.social and brilliantly organised by @drselintekin.bsky.social & @merveozturkey.bsky.social

See the speakers and register to get the link here: www.bps.org.uk/event/relief...

<em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library <em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> is an international journal publishing impactful basic and applied social psychological research from all parts of the world.

-- Call for Papers --

Special issue on "Intersectionality in Social Psychology: Perspectives, Methods, and Applications" in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

Abstract submission deadline: 15 December 2025

From Relief to Resistance: Sustaining Collective Action for Structural Change | BPS The second in a three part event series from the Social Psychology Section, gathering emergency practitioners and researchers in the social psychology field.

FREE online webinar from @bps-social-psych.bsky.social that may be of interest:
'From Relief to Resistance – Sustaining Collective Action for Structural Change'
6 November, 2-4pm

More details below:
www.bps.org.uk/event/relief...

Rising together: How collective action emerges in the face of an emergency | BPS Dr Selin Tekin reflects on the first event in the Rising Together series, hosted by the BPS Social Psychology Section.

Thanks to @bps-social-psych.bsky.social for bringing my notes together from the event that @merveozturkey.bsky.social & I organized.

Reflections came from the responses of: @profjohndrury.bsky.social @lucygobag.bsky.social Dr Rim Saab and Dr Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir

www.bps.org.uk/news/rising-...

Beyond Dichotomies: Rethinking Protest Tactics and How They Shape Allyship by Mete Sefa Uysal (university of Exeter) Peer Review as Conversation (90 Minutes) Reviewers: Yasemin Gülsüm Acar (St Andrews University) and Carmen Marazzi (Clark University) Abstract: Allyship in social movements does not emerge in a vacuum. It unfolds in contested political and moral contexts where the tactics used by marginalised groups play a critical role in shaping support from the general public. Yet, existing scholarship often collapses diverse protest forms into binary categories like normative vs. nonnormative or conventional vs. radical. Recent studies on confrontational collective action (Uysal et al., 2024,2025) challenge existing categorisations that treat protest tactics as fixed and morally preferable over one another. It sees protest tactics as a continuum in which they coexist within activists’ repertoires of resistance and shifts the focus to the conditions under which individuals transition between tactics against repression. Following this critique, I aim to discuss when confrontational and disruptive actions hinder and catalyse solidarity and allyship, rather than treating them as inherently alienating. Register here: http://tinyurl.com/disruptive-protest Monday, November 10, 2025 Vancouver, Canada: 9:00; New York, United States: 12:00; London, United Kingdom: 17:00; Ramallah, Palestine: 19:00 The picture includes a headshot of Mete Sefa Uysal wearing glasses and a vertically striped shirt in a green leafy background. The picture also includes a QR code for the registration link also added to the original post.

The next session of Psychology of Resistance Virtual Meetings is next Monday, November 10:

We do a peer review as conversation with @metesefauysal.bsky.social on confrontational-disruptive protests,
@yasemingacar.bsky.social and Carmen Marazzi as discusants

To register: tinyurl.com/disruptive-p...

‘It felt like forever’: passengers recount mass stabbing on Cambridgeshire train Some initially assumed the commotion was a Halloween prank, but soon realised something awful was unfolding

'Panic'?
It's important to look at what passengers actually did. Not just flight, but also information and assistance:

'Amid a group of six, they were also attempting to stem the flow of blood from the head of the older man who was said to have saved the girl.'

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

'How Participation in Collective Action Changes Relationships, Behaviours, and Beliefs: An Interview Study of the Role of Inter- and Intragroup Processes' @swedishprotests.bsky.social

Re-reading this one from 2019 as part of my teaching preparation

jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/js...

A well-attended Crowds & identities, expertly convened by @freyamills.bsky.social, with presentation on his important work on collective action for Uyghur Muslims in China among Muslims in Turkey and the United Kingdom, by @metesefauysal.bsky.social

@merveozturkey.bsky.social & I are organizing an event with the @bps-social-psych.bsky.social
Rising Together: How Collective Action Emerges in the Face of an Emergency
Our wonderful speakers:
Dr. Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir
Dr. Rim Saab
Prof. @lucygobag.bsky.social
Prof. @profjohndrury.bsky.social

Public behaviour in response to perceived hostile threats: An evidence base and guide for practitioners and policymakers

Funded by @ukri.org

doi.org/10.20919/VJV...

New book just arrived in the post! Includes chapter by me & @evangelospsych.bsky.social on collective resilience as a process in emergent groups in emergencies.