Dr Samuel Pehrson

Background

I completed my PhD in social psychology at the University of Sussex in 2008. My doctoral thesis was awarded the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) Best Dissertation Award. I then worked as a research fellow at the University of Limerick and the University of St Andrews before joining QUB as a lecturer in 2010.

Research Interests

I am interested in nationalism and racism, seeing them as intertwined ideological phenomena that shape our social relations through the identities that they create. I study the way this plays out in the politics of immigration, multiculturalism and ‘community cohesion’.

My work emphasizes the need for social psychologists to attend as closely to the content and meaning of particular collective identities as we do to generic identity processes. I have also argued for the importance of representations of ‘us’ - and not only representations of ‘them’ - in prejudice and intergroup relations.

Recent Publications

Pehrson, S., Vignoles, V., & Brown, R. (2009). National identification and anti-immigrant prejudice: Individual and contextual effects of national definitions. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 24-38.

Pehrson, S., Brown, R., & Zagefka, H. (2009). When does national identification lead to the rejection of immigrants? Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence for the role of essentialist in-group definitions. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 61-76.

Pehrson, S., & Leach, C. W. (2010). Eugenics. In J. Levine & M. Hogg (Eds.), Encyclopedia of group processes and intergroup relations. Sage.

Pehrson, S. & Leach, C. W. (Forthcoming). Beyond ‘old’ and ‘new’: For a social psychology of racism. In J. Dixon & M. Levine (Eds.) Beyond the ‘prejudice problematic’: Extending the social psychology of intergroup conflict, inequality and social change. Cambridge University Press.

Zagefka, H., Pehrson, S., Mole, R. C. M., & Chan, E. (in press). The effect of essentialism in settings of historic intergroup atrocities. European Journal of Social Psychology.

Pehrson, S. & Green, E. G. T. (in press). Who we are and who can join us: National identity content and entry criteria for new immigrants. Journal of Social Issues.

Pehrson, S., Gonzalez, R. & Brown, R. Indigenous rights in Chile: National identity and majority group support for multicultural policies. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Research Grants
2009: ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship £23,066 (PTA-026-27-2121)