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At the Organizational Behaviour Group (Faculty of Social Sciences) at Utrecht University we are looking for a PhD candidate.
Project
Societies undergo rapid changes in the relations between social groups, for example due to migration, shifting gender roles, globalization, crises like Covid-19, and social movements like #BLM. Heated societal debates suggest that social changes are often perceived as threatening, leading to a host of negative consequences like rigidity, polarization, and hostility towards the source of the threat. This makes understanding how people cope with social change one of the major challenges of our times. However, how people regulate negative arousal stemming from societal change, and how this in turn shapes opinions, is as yet poorly understood.
The current project aims to develop a psychophysiological threat-and-coping model of social change. Linking social, psychological, and physiological levels of analysis this novel model describes and explains the interplay between lower-level physiological responses, and higher-level information processing, to understand how people form opinions about social change. Moving beyond maladaptive physiological arousal (threat) the possibility will be examined that change can also elicit more benign arousal (challenge) and link this to sensitivity to specific types of arguments (instrumental, moral, identity) and rigidity versus open-mindedness in opinion formation.
In a series of psychophysiological experiments, partly making use of a mobile lab (‘test-van’) to run psychophysiological experiments in the field, hypotheses derived from the model will be tested.
In the current project the focus will be specifically on (dealing with) the threat of change due to the implementation of corporate social responsibility practices relating to sustainability and diversity within organizations. (A related PhD project on coping with threats due to migration will be run simultaneously at Leiden University.)
The insights gained will be used to inform policy-makers about ways to approach and communicate social change in order to avoid overly rigid and hostile responses.
The PhD-project will be supervised by Prof. Daan Scheepers, Prof. Naomi Ellemers and Dr. Félice van Nunspeet.
The position includes the following activities:
Starting preferably 1 November 2021, you will be offered a temporary position (1.0 FTE), initially for one year with an extension to a total of four years upon a positive assessment in the first year. The gross salary ranges between €2,395 in the first year and €3,061 in the fourth year of employment (scale P according to the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities) per month for a full-time employment. Salaries are supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and a year-end bonus of 8.3% per year. In addition, Utrecht University offers excellent secondary conditions, including an attractive retirement scheme, (partly paid) parental leave and flexible employment conditions (multiple choice model). More information about working at Utrecht University can be found here.
A better future for everyone. This ambition motivates our scientists in executing their leading research and inspiring teaching. At Utrecht University, the various disciplines collaborate intensively towards major societal themes. Our focus is on Dynamics of Youth, Institutions for Open Societies, Life Sciences and Sustainability.
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