Thomas Kessler

Admiration: A Conceptual Review

Admiration is thought to have essential functions for social interaction: it inspires us to learn from excellent models, to become better people, and to praise others and create social bonds. In intergroup relations, admiration for other groups leads to greater intergroup contact, cooperation, and help. Given these implications, it is surprising that admiration has only been researched by a handful of authors. In this article we review the literature, focusing on the definition of admiration, links to related emotions, measurement, antecedents, and associated behaviors. We propose a conceptual model of admiration that highlights admiration’s function for approaching and emulating successful models, thus contributing to social learning at the interpersonal level and to cultural transmission at the group and societal level.

Intergroup emulation: An improvement strategy for lower status groups

The social psychological literature on social change has focused on how groups overcome oppression and inequality. In this paper, we investigate an alternative strategy that groups employ for social change—the emulation of successful outgroups. We propose that lower status group members will be likely to employ a learning strategy when they perceive the status relations as legitimate (i.e., fair system) and unstable (i.e., own position is improvable). In Study 1 (Romanian undergraduate students, N = 31), we manipulated status legitimacy, while in Study 2 (British undergraduate participants, N = 94), we manipulated legitimacy and stability orthogonally. Overall, when they perceived status hierarchies as legitimate and unstable, participants exhibited higher admiration for the higher status outgroup, higher support for learning-related help (e.g., transfer of know-how, training) from the outgroup and had the most positive attitudes toward intergroup help. We propose that social change sometimes occurs gradually, through help and learning from successful models, and this paper offers insight into such gradual social change.

Inspired by the outgroup: A social identity analysis of intergroup admiration

Drawing upon a social identity approach, three studies focus on the elicitors of intergroup admiration by investigating the relationship between admiration for an outgroup and this outgroup’s prototypicality for a superordinate category. In Study 1 (N = 314), we find empirical support for a positive association between prototypicality and admiration in cross-national survey data. In Study 2 (N = 52), we provide experimental evidence for the relationship between admiration and prototypicality by manipulating different facets of prototypicality: admiration for an outgroup occurs only when the group is perceived as prototypical in relation to the ideal of the superordinate category, but not in relation to the category average. Study 3 further explores the importance of prototypicality for a superordinate category. We present an analysis of online comments to news articles (N = 477) referring to positive regard of outgroups and highlight the role of prototypicality in these discussions. Overall, we contribute to research on admiration by showing that the elicitation of admiration is dependent on the social identities involved, providing an identity-situated analysis of this positive group-based emotion.

Political diversity versus stimuli diversity: Alternative ways to improve social psychological science.

Instead of enhancing diversity in research groups, we suggest that in order to reduce biases in social psychological research a more basic formulation and systematic testing of theories is required. Following the important but often neglected ecological research approach would lead to systematic variation of stimuli and sometimes representative sampling of stimuli for specific environments.

Divorcing the puzzles: When group identities foster in-group cooperation.

We argue that general social psychological mechanisms (e.g., common group identity) can account for prosocial behavior and cooperative norms without the need for punishing Big Gods. Moreover, prosocial religions often do not prevent conflict within their religious groups. Hence, we doubt whether Big Gods and prosocial religions are more effective than alternative identities in enhancing high-level cooperation.