 Welcome everybody to our Give Seminar of this week. We're really happy to have a panel of presenters and I'll let Professor Kate Reynolds introduce them in a moment. So this is from our social personality theme this week. So before we get into it, I'll pass to Callie. We'll do some housekeeping reminders for everybody and then to our theme convener to introduce our speakers. So we hope you enjoy today. Thanks. Hi everyone. Just a couple of little housekeeping things. It's just a reminder that the seminar is going to be recorded and it will be available on the Psychology Events page and YouTube. So you've all been muted upon entering the webinar and we're just going to ask that you please stay muted for the duration of the seminar. If you have questions during, you can put them in the question box or we can do questions at the end by you raising your hands if you want to ask then. Okay, well I'll hand you over to Kate. Okay, welcome everyone. Well, how exciting is this? We have four of the newest sort of staff members in the research School of Psychology who are going to talk to us about their research and their expertise and the kind of things that they're working on and each of those speakers is going to talk for 10 minutes and that will leave us with about 10 minutes for question and answers towards the end. So we have and the presenters will present in this order. So we have Dr. Samantha Stanley who's focusing on ideological attitudes in climate change action. We've got Dr. Zoe Levingston who's talking about factors and responses to social and environmental challenges and we're having a few of those at the moment. We've also got Dr. Neymar Orizani who's talking about collective action and Dr. Olivia Evans whose expertise is on social class, social integration and mental health. So very much looking forward to hearing more about your work and I'll hand over now to Samantha. Hi everyone and thank you Kate for the introduction. I'll just get my slides up and then you can get started. Okay, I'm hoping everyone can see that. Yes, we can. Perfect, thank you. So today I thought I'd briefly present my recent work with Jess Williamson on attitudes towards climate driven migration or climate refugees in New Zealand. So I thought I'd start with a sobering statistic because this is what got me really interested in this topic and that is that by 2050, we'll have an estimated 200 million people driven to relocate around the world due to the effects of climate change. So many of those people who will be displaced will have the opportunity to move within their country. So they'll become, I guess, internal climate refugees. But for people in low-lying coastal nations threatened already by sea level rise, there's little option to move to higher ground and they're expected to be displaced internationally. So people in Kiribati and Tuvalu are an example of those expected to become some of the world's first climate refugees. So here in Australia and also in New Zealand, it's been suggested that we're best placed to resettle people from the Pacific. So there's been about a dozen or so applications in New Zealand in as many years for people to become climate refugees, but they've all been dismissed for the same reason. And that is that people fleeing the effects of climate change do not qualify as refugees. So essentially, we're heading towards possibly one of the biggest global refugee crises in history with international agreements not currently in place to protect those who are expected to become displaced. So other researchers have commented that we should be putting in the work now to try and establish broad-based political support for helping climate refugees. But currently, there's very little research being conducted in psychology on how to do that or even what people's attitudes are towards this problem. So our research started with one very basic aim and that's just to find out what people thought about approaches to helping climate refugees in New Zealand. So there were two approaches we looked at. The first is climate aid. So this is things like helping people in the Pacific adapt to the effects of climate change and the other is supporting climate-driven migration. Next, we also had an explanatory aim. So as Kate mentioned, I'm quite interested in these ideological attitudes and how they've been applied to attitudes towards climate change and immigration. And we thought we would build a model to test whether they extend to predict attitudes towards climate refugee policy. So we did this with two independent samples of people living in New Zealand and quite good sample sizes as well. We're very fortunate. So our first question, what do New Zealanders support? We presented them with a range of different actions that the New Zealand government could do and they rated the extent that they supported or opposed each one of these. So for simplicity here, I'm just showing you the percent who lengths towards supporting each policy and towards opposing each policy. So across both samples, you can see those top options. People were certainly very happy to support action that brought or welcomed climate change refugees to New Zealand, whether that's accepting climate refugees New Zealand or joining an international agreement to facilitate that. So as a reminder, these are the measures that we're not currently doing in New Zealand. So applications for refugee status have been rejected on that basis. There's lower support for foreign aid. So 65% supported that, so still pretty high. And these are the measures that the New Zealand government currently is doing. And down the bottom there, we have the lowest support for New Zealand paying for sea walls to be built in low-lying coastal nations, which is the adaptation measure that is most desperately needed. All right, so moving on to our second question. So we draw on a few different theories to construct this model of ideology-based opposition to refugee policy. So the first half of this model is based on Duckett's dual process model. The full model does include a few extra variables, but to fit this into the slide and into a 10-minute talk, I've cut those off. So if you're familiar with Duckett's model, the view of the world as a dangerous place, a dangerous worldviews informs adoption of right-wing authoritarianism. So that's this preference for strict punitive social control. And the view of the world as a competitive place predicts social dominance orientations. That's the preference for social hierarchy and inequality. So from social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism, leading towards policy support, we included two mediators, and that's symbolic and realistic threat perceptions. So these ones are based on integrated threat theory. Symbolic threats are the perceptions that the incoming group, so in this case, climate refugees will differ in culture, values, and traditions to New Zealanders. And the realistic threats are the beliefs that the incoming group will compete for resources, jobs, and political power. So I'll talk first through the RWA pathway. So those who were relatively more supportive of right-wing authoritarianism were a bit less supportive of climate refugee policy. And this was in part explained by them believing there's greater risk of realistic threats. So bringing climate refugees to New Zealand would undermine the economic wellbeing of New Zealanders. Quite similar with social dominance orientation, although here we have a stronger direct and indirect effect on policy support. So a relatively greater tolerance of inequality, so higher SDO predicts lower support for climate refugee policy. And this effect partly goes through the belief that the intake of climate refugees would threaten the economic wellbeing of New Zealanders. So the full model here explained just over half of the variance in support for this policy. It fit the data well, and we replicated that in our two independent samples. So with the slight variation of the wording of the climate refugee policy item. So starting from the left-hand side of the two ideological attitudes, we found that social dominance orientation was more strongly related to attitudes towards climate refugee policy. Notably, both RWA and SDO predicted increased concerns about symbolic and realistic threats, but symbolic threat did not seem to undermine support for climate refugee policy. That seems to be the stronger barrier is perceived threat to economic wellbeing. All right, so to very briefly sum up. So overall, we found that New Zealanders were generally more supportive of these approaches that involved welcoming climate refugees to New Zealand. And returning to that question about broad-based political support, we do appear to have that for climate refugee policy. So when we look at average support levels of the people who voted for the five main political parties who won seats in the last election, all mean scores are above the midpoint. So overall, people are quite happy with these policies. Interestingly, that was not the case for climate aid. So their average support drops and for right-wing political parties, the votes of those parties overall oppose increased foreign aid or paying for seawalls. So the conclusions based on that model I showed you. So what appears to undermine support for climate refugee policy seems to be about this concern over resources and the competitiveness of social dominance orientation. So we can make a few conclusions or predictions about what this means for framing climate-driven migration. It's not something we read about in the news very often, but if we're expecting 200 million people to be displaced in the next 30 years, it likely will be. So if we can figure out a communication strategy now that will be helpful. And our results suggest that we need to be really careful to avoid framing the acceptance of climate refugees as increasing competition. So for instance, we might highlight how they contribute rather than compete for jobs and economic resources. So we also found that these concerns about culture, values and norms don't seem to undermine support for climate refugee policy too much. And I think that makes sense given the context and it might not replicate in other countries. So in New Zealand, the likely refugees that would move from the Pacific where we already have strong cultural ties. Last thing currently at least in New Zealand, RWA based opposition appears to be relatively weak. But I could see that strengthening as we see climate driven migration talked about as a security threat or risking increased conflict. So those types of narratives also should ideally be avoided because they have the potential to strengthen that RWA based opposition. All right, that is my time up. My email address is on the slide here. If anyone has questions we don't get to today or if you're really interested in this stuff and see potential for collaboration. Thank you. Okay, thanks, Samantha. So we might move on to Zoe. Okay, just gonna have a bit of blind faith that you can all see that. So I'm gonna be talking about climate changes as well and the role of social comparison and social perception. So along my research deals with environmental attitudes and behavior and the main ability of these. And one of the most useful concepts in our disposal as applied researchers is the concept of social norms. So briefly, we can encourage attitudinal behavior of change by appealing to what society thinks is the right thing to do, the so-called injunctive norm and probably more successfully from an empirical point of view, we can point out what people are actually doing to help the environment in some good area, so-called descriptive norm. And appealing to these norms should have the outcome of impaling change in the individual to attempt to align themselves with the society of law. And there's a lot of good work done in the environmental space about harnessing norms to change people's behaviors, particularly in the area of reducing things like water use and energy use and so on. But of course, one of the great challenges with this sort of research is that people are generally pretty bad estimators of what the true norms are. So we like to think of a pretty good handle on what other people are thinking and doing, how our own attitudes and behaviors compares with that. But in fact, the other suggests we're pretty lousy in reality. And there's a raft of psychological reasons that might be the case, including that it's within our own social and psychological interest to unconsciously see the actual norm or even to consciously step outside the norm in order to stand out from the pack as it were. So one of my chief interests is not so much in the application of social norms to say, but in understanding why and when those normative misperceptions occur. So of course, these misperceptions occur over a whole range of domains and including with regards to responses to climate change. So a robust finding we've come across, for instance, is that people will tend to significantly overestimate the amount of people that deny climate change is happening. So they think there are more climate deniers in the true sense than there actually are. So that figure hovers in the last 10 years or so, but somewhere between five and seven cents. But people consistently estimate that about a quarter of Australians think that way. So that's kind of a pluralistic ignorance effect. So if there's an opinion that's quite fringe, it's generally misperceived as enjoying quite a bit of support. Now, the other thing we've found is that people tend to think they do more for the environment than others. So we find more than half of the Australians who've sampled in the past tend to be self-enhanced, as you feel like, with respect to the social comparisons they make about their behavior with others. And that self-enhancing comparison seems to have its corollaries too. So we find that people who self-enhanced also tend to think they'll cope better with climate change. They feel less climate change related to guilt and they feel less of an ethical duty to respond to climate change. So here we've got two quite different instances of misperception operating in the same domain. So in the first instance, I think it's quite easy to draw on sociocultural accounts of why that misperception might arise. For instance, you might have media bias in airtime given to particular views, and that in turn might give off faulty informational cues to people about where sentiment in this country lies. But in the second instance, I think perhaps an intrapersonal account might be more plausible. So if feeling better than average in terms of your environmental behavior helps ward off threat and discomfort from something like climate change, then maybe that's a good thing for individually staking. Collectively, of course, it could be a bit disastrous for us all thinking that we're better than average. But to treat that as purely an intracyclic phenomenon ignores the importance of group identities. And we know from both the social norm and social identity traditions that what matters to people is not so much what some amorphous mass of Australians in general are thinking or what they're doing, but what people like us happen to be thinking and doing. Now, exactly who people like us is in the context of climate change is to my mind under theorized at the moment. But there is one group category that's received an awful lot of attention here and that's political-like entity affiliation. And that does do a lot of legwork in predicting patterns in these kinds of misdeceptions that I think that's to the detriment of looking at other categories and identities. And I think one of those important categories is ethnic and cultural identity. Now, on the issue of ethnic and cultural identity and diversity more broadly, climate and environmental events in general have a bit of a problem here. And it's a self-confessed problem of being too white and too privileged, but particularly too white. So extinction rebellion, who you all would have heard of in particular, they think criticised not only for the lack of diversity in their race, but also strategies like subjecting themselves to mass arrest because in so doing they don't take into account the fact that ethnic minorities may have had very different experiences with legal systems and policing authorities and probably won't get treated as leniently as someone from a white middle class background if they get arrested during one of these protest events. And the other point is the lack of diversity is important even just in terms of optics, right? Because the optics of protest, a lot of which get a lot of media attention, that's another way of implicitly signalling social normative information. So in these images, who are the people marching in the streets? Are they people like us? And this is why extinction rebellion, a very keen, for instance, for some of their people to wear their business suits to mass arrests events rather than their tie dye. So some recent work on ethnic identity and environmental perceptions has in fact been done in the US a couple of years ago. So Adam Pearson and his colleagues looked at environmental concern in different segments of the US public and found that Latino, Asian and black Americans were actually more concerned about environmental matters than were white Americans. And yet perceptions were very different. So people thought whites were the most concerned group and those other groups the least concerned. So something they turned the environmental the lead paradox. But probably the most troubling aspect of this research is that that pattern of misdeception holds for Latino Asian black Americans themselves. So even though these people were the most concerned, they incorrectly perceived their group as a whole was the least concerned. So I think those findings are somewhat antithetical to the social perception literature that suggests there's almost a universal tendency to enhance the self with all your group in comparison with others. This is almost a case of internalization of like negative stereotypes. And actually that's what the authors found a relationship with that those groups were not perceived as being associated with environmentalists in general. So Pearson and his colleagues found they were able to correct the paradox somewhat by presenting participants with a diverse representation of a climate organization versus a non-diverse representation. But only corrected the paradox slightly because people revised down their estimations about white Americans and just ended up thinking less of that group. So perceptions of those other groups remained unchanged. So just to end one of the projects we're just starting out on now is to test whether this environmental lead paradox operates in the Australian context. So as far as ethnicity goes methodologically it's a little more challenging in the Australian context than it is in the US. So in the US there are long established ethnic categories and pretty clearly defined intergroup relationships that relations have gone on for decades. So categorizing Australian residents into distinct ethnic groups and allowing for a bit of nuance to pick up things like dual identities is one of the challenges we do have in operationalizing it. So we've got our two overarching research questions and we're collecting cross-sectional data for this at the moment which is to test whether minority culture Australians are actually more concerned about climate change than majority culture Australians are. Just quietly, I'm pretty confident about that one because I took a sneaky peek at the data and also to see whether minority Australians are perceived by both the majority and minority culture groups as being less concerned. So that paradox. And then the next part is an extension of Pearson's work to see whether these effects have implications for different individual and behavioral outcomes. So for instance, if you're part of an ethnic minority that falsely believes your group has lower than average environmental concern does this have a knock-on effect in terms of what sort of collective action activities you're going to engage in? Are you less likely to join a climate march or talk to others about climate change, post on social media and so on? Because if it does have a knock-on effect you can see why that might have reinforcing effects for that paradox to keep hold. Also of interest is looking at individual level outcomes. So we know that engaging in collective activities such as protests can have these cathartic benefits by enhancing feelings of belongingness and so on. So if you're concerned about the environment but opt out of these collective actions because it's not for people like me, what sort of implications might this have for individual health outcomes like withdrawal, anxiety and ethnic disabilities? So depending on what those cross-sectional findings throw up there might be scope to develop some experimental manipulations that might help correct those misconceptions. And I just conclude by saying if anyone's interested in collaborating on those future phases or just being involved in the research in general, please feel free to get in contact with me. I think we might have lost Kate somehow so I will just step in and invite our next speaker, Neema. He'll be staring by some of you recently, Serge. Can you see my screen? Not yet, Neema. What about now? Something wrong with me. Yes, I think we've got an A in your background. Okay, what about now? Yep, you're all good. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for all those who were involved in putting this seminar together. So today I'm going to talk about the perceived mobilisation of radical ideologies from the left and right and its effects on people's willingness to restrict the freedom of speech and political tolerance. So as you all would know, during the past decades or two decades, the political gap between left and the right, at least in the context of the United States, has been getting wider and wider. And as you can see here, a survey done by Pew from 1999 to 2016, I think, you can see the gap between the two political parties. And this is not just about the people who come from the radical right or alt-right people. You can also see radicals from the left that are being seen in any collective actions appearing and getting into fights and stuff like that. So both parties, both people from both political parties, seems getting and becoming more radicalised. And take this as just a description, not evaluation so far. So there is this concern among people by the term normalisation to do with the idea that those beliefs and a way of thinking that was previously was not normative. People didn't use to talk about it, but nowadays you can see it on social media, TV channels and stuff like that. So both political parties and people who are affiliated with those parties see people from their side, an opposite side as well, on TV channels expressing their radical views. So here I'm going to see the effect of normalisation on the extent to which people are willing to restrict the freedom of speech on both sides of the political spectrum. And if you look at some of the rhetoric that are raising, especially among liberals, you can see some discourses like some terms like trigger warnings, safe space or hate speech. And that would lead to disinvitation or what these days is called the culture of cancel, cancel that do not allow those people who see it on the other side of the political spectrum come to the university and have a debate or something of that sort. So it's not just among conservative. And actually, if we look at the literature, we can see in the literature that usually it was liberals that tend to tolerate the speech that they dislike compared to their conservative people. And usually in the literature, you can see that it was the conservatives who use mostly a concern with the limitations of the freedom of speech. So they believe that the freedom of speech should have some limitations and there should be some lines that should not be crossed and so on and so forth. But during these years, it seems that they switch. Nowadays, these are the conservatives that support and advocates for the freedom of speech. And today's, you can see more and more liberals that raise their concern about the limitation of freedom of speech. So there is this kind of shift between conservative and liberals, liberals worry about the normalization of the radical vibratory, which is xenophobic, racist, sexist, misogynist and anti-Semitic from their point of view. And conservatives worry about the normalization of the radical left vibratory, which is socially stand out. And it seems that both sides are worried about the future of their group, which is manifested in what we call collective action. And in the literature, in social psychological literature, as a concern about the vitality of in-groups future. So the goal of the current research was to see the effects of perceived normalization of the radical opponent and in-group, both on political tolerance, willingness to restrict opponent's right to freedom of speech and in-groups worry about the public image of their political party. So the last one is about to what extent, let's say if I'm a liberal, to what extent I worry about radical left that takes over the image of my political party. I also measured collective angst as a mediator, which I will be talking about in a little bit. So we ran two studies. I'm going to present just the results of the study one because of time, but we could replicate this, the results of the study one and study two as well. So basically what we did, we first asked people about their political orientation and then we exposed them to this idea of normalization by showing them a scenario and telling them that, hey, there are the number of people from the opposite side that get to appear in TV channels are getting more frequent. So for example, we told conservatives that Bernie Sanders' appearance on Fox News is getting more and more. And we did the same for liberal people, Alex Jones, for example, I get more appearance on liberal media. And what we measure, obviously political affiliation, we used 14 items. Their opinion about abortion and traditional value has got ownership, et cetera. Political tolerance, to what extent they are willing to shut their political opponents down. An example of those items are, we need to actively oppose those who disagree with us. We also measured their attitudes toward restricting opponents' rights to freedom of speech. Items like freedom of speech should be restricted for moderate conservatives or liberals since the opinions in dangerous society. We also have the same items, not just for moderate conservative or liberals, but also for radical conservatives or liberals. Then we measured collective angst. Items like, I think, the future of liberalism or conservatism is under threat by conservatives or liberals, depending on the condition. And finally, the participants concern over the image of their part. Items like allowing political figures from the far right or far left to be the voice of conservatism or liberalism will damage conservatism or liberalism as a part. Because there was interaction between political affiliation as a continuous variable and normalization as a categorical independent variable. So there was two independent variables. One was categorical, which was normalization of the left or normalization of the right or the control condition. And another independent variable was political affiliation, which was continuous. So you can see here that by orange line, if you look at the orange line, when liberals see the radicalization, the normalization of the radical right, they are less tolerant of their opponent as opposed to them liberals when they are exposed to the radicalization, to the normalization of their point of view. So this change in liberals were significant, but for conservatives, there was no difference. So no matter what kind of normalization they were exposed to, there was no significant difference between on the political tolerance. Also, there was no significant difference both for liberal conservatives compared to the control condition. Here, both liberals and conservatives chose significant difference where they were opposed to their radical views as opposed to their opponents radical views. So for example, again, if you look at the orange line here for liberals, when they were exposed to the normalization of the right, they were more willing to restrict the freedom of speech for moderate openings, for moderate conservatives. But when they were exposed to normalization of the radical left, which where they are in a group, they were more willing to tolerate or they were less willing to restrict the freedom of speech for their openness. And the same was true when it comes to conservatives. So when they were exposed to normalization of their political point of view, they were more willing, as you can see here, less willing to restrict the freedom of speech or more willing to tolerate. Here is the resultant collective acts, the extent to which they were worried about the future of their groups. So as you can imagine, both conservatives and liberals were more worried when they were exposed to the normalization of their opponents as opposed to themselves. So in order to see what is the mechanism, what makes even liberals to be more willing to restrict the freedom of speech for their opponents, we use collective acts as mediator. But because political affiliation was more likely to be moderated, the relationship, we use a moderated mediation model to see the effect. And as you can see here, switch between normalization of the left to normalization of their rights makes liberals more anxious about the future of their group, let's say liberal party. And this increased collective acts leads to less political tolerance or more willingness to restrict the freedom of speech for the opponents. We can reverse the moderated mediation and see the same effect in conservative as well. The flip side of it is when people who are conservative are exposed to the normalization of their rights, their angst about the future of their group decreases and this decreased collective angst leads to more political tolerance or less willingness to restrict the freedom of speech for their opponents. So one co-efficiency is negative for liberal and the other one is positive for conservative. I just want to mention here that even though the results were the same for both liberals and conservatives in terms of when they were exposed to the normalization of their opponents, they were less politically tolerant or more willing to restrict the freedom of speech, but it seems that it was easier for liberals to let go of this anxiety when they were exposed to the normalization of their own political ideology as opposed to conservatives. It seems that the anxiety that conservatives has is much harder to get rid of, but I just want to emphasize on this idea that both liberals and conservatives can show the same intolerance depending on the situation in the sense that if they were, they were exposed to the right stimuli in a sense that we can use the right stimuli to induce the threat. The thing is that the subject that induces these threats might be different for conservatives compared to liberals. Thank you very much. Thanks, Neema. So we'll now move on to hear from Olivia. So am I still sharing my... No. Okay, I think everyone should be able to see that. Hi, so thanks, Kate, for organizing the seminar and asking me to speak. And also to Kristen, Kali and Michaela for making it all happen behind the scenes. So I thought I'd talk today a little bit about sort of my PhD research and then also to an ARC project that it's sort of led to and where that project is now. So, yeah. So I'll start with a little very short background to sort of the main themes of my PhD research, which was investigating the role of social integration in the relationship between social class and mental health. So this is kind of the general trend that I was trying to understand in my research, which is probably something that you've all seen before. The social gradient of mental health where people with sort of the most wealth and status and higher incomes in society tend to have the best mental health and the people with the least of these things tend to have much poorer mental health and higher rates of mental illness and things like that. And so one of the ways that I thought that this might be occurring to this social gradient is through social integration. So I focused on the idea that social integration and social support as part of that play a role in the relationships so that perhaps lower class or working class people are less socially integrated or supported and this in turn is sort of driving this effect of social class and mental health. And this is just one of the models that I found in my thesis, but I think it sort of captures the general trend that I found. So across several different studies with, I think, over 20,000 participants in total, I found this medial evidence of social integration mediating the relationship between social class and mental health. So my results pointed towards the lower your social class being than the less socially integrated or socially supported you are and that this in turn is detrimental to your mental health. And yeah, as I said, I found that kind of multiple times and looked at it in the general Australian population. I also explored some of the reasons why this might be occurring. So I'm in particular in the social class and social integration and so why does social class lead to lower social integration? But I won't get into that today. If anyone's interested, feel free to read my thesis or ask me about it. So yeah, that's just the backdrop to the first part of my PhD research, where I looked at the general population. But then I also focused on these relationships in a higher education setting. So we find a very similar relationship happening in the university student population as what happens in the general population. So working class or low SES or first in family students are at a much higher risk of experiencing mental health issues. So they generally have poor wellbeing and poor mental health more generally. And this is particularly alarming because university students are already an extremely high risk population. So they tend to, students in general, experience all of these things, but working class students are at a particularly high risk of developing mental health problems when they're at university. And we also know from research that working class students are also less socially integrated. So they don't attend as many social events. They don't feel as though they belong to university. They're less likely to adopt a university student identity. And they find it difficult to forge new connections. And they just generally feel more isolated and disconnected than other students while they're at university. And so similar to what I found in the general population, I found in the university population. So I found this model where student social class is related to mental health. Some of this goes through a pathway of social integration. So I'll just make a quick note here about the way that I conceptualise these variables. So I've got some points there about the different kinds of things I measure for each across all my studies. So social class I tend to measure using a broad range of different items that some have into the general socio-economic status items like occupation and education. But then we also look at the social side of social class. So what social class people identify with and things like their subjective social status. Social integration, I also conceptualise really broadly and find sort of very similar relationships regardless of how I conceptualise it. So this could be just how many friends they have or how much contact they have with other students but also things like social capital and also kind of the inverse of integration, loneliness. And then mental health as well. I found the results across multiple different dimensions of mental health. So not just mental ill health but also wellbeing, like satisfaction with life. So after this finding in the higher education population the next phase to consider was if we want to improve working class student mental health through this pathway of social integration we need to understand why lower class students aren't connecting socially at university. So what are the barriers to social integration or what are the differences between students that mean that they're not being as integrated when they come to university. They're not connecting with other students and that kind of thing. So I will admit that I tested a lot of potential explanations in my research and I didn't find a lot of evidence for some of them but one thing I did find and that was supported by previous research is the impact that the life circumstances of university students have on their ability to socially integrate. So these are really like rounded concepts to do with the time and money that they have. So what I found and what was supported by previous research in the area is that working class students report having less time to socialize and they also have less money available to socialize and that this in turn predicts their lower social integration. So the reason for these time and money differences can be seen in what we already know about low SCS or first in family or working class students. So they tend to come to university later in their life. So they generally have far more obligations and responsibilities than other students that take up their time outside of studying. They're also more likely to have to work to support themselves or their family while they're at university and so they are not only more likely to have a job but they're more likely to be working full-time or part-time hours or just a lot more hours than other students and they're also more likely to have obligations like looking after children and things like that. So we already know kind of that the life circumstances of students is different to what we consider of these students is different to what we consider the life circumstances for the traditional students so a student who, from a middle class family who comes straight to university from high school. So we were thinking about this sort of relationship through time and money, explaining social integration and how we can address it because we can't necessarily change the life circumstances and we wouldn't want to either. Students should be able to come to university and experience the full sort of ability of being a student and all the connections and things that come with that without needing to be sort of fresh out of high school and into university. So that brings me to sort of the next phase of my research or the next place where we went with it was considering this idea of online integration so whether we can replace the on-campus sort of face-to-face integration that students have with an online replacement. And so one obvious answer to that is using social media. So we thought social media might be the option because it allows users to access their social networks at a time and place that suits them and it's also usually free. So it sort of addresses these time and money issues. So students can use social media to connect with and build and maintain their relationships and networks with other students without the need to be in person and on-campus or attending university events that might cost money and things like that. This suggestion is a little risky though and I'm sure that it might have even raised a few eyebrows over Zoom because the jury is still out on whether social media is actually good or bad for us, especially in terms of our connections with others and our mental health. So actually the dominant narrative that you'll hear in the media and things about social media is that it's making us disconnected, anxious messes who don't know how to talk to other humans. But the research on social media use in mental health and social connections isn't that quite clear part on whether it's sort of good or bad for us in those ways. So there's fairly compelling evidence now that things like passive use, so where you just look at things that other people are posting and passively look at things without interacting with them, that can be bad for your mental health because it leads to things like social comparison and envy. But on the other hand, if you're actively engaging on social media and you're sharing your gender and self and things like that, it can actually be quite affirming and can be good for building networks and be good for well-being. But nonetheless, before we just went out and recommended that students start using social media, especially at-risk students who we know already might have poor mental health, we needed to know more about whether online integration is actually a feasible option when the benefits were going to be what we expected them to be. So last year we applied for and we're successful in receiving funding from the ARC for a project investigating the potential of online integration to benefit low SES students. So we proposed five projects that aim to build an understanding of what students are already doing in terms of online integration and compare this to their offline or in-person integration and then test a few different approaches for promoting online social integration using in particular Facebook groups which we know a lot of students already use to sort of build and maintain their social networks at uni. And in particular, we were hoping to find evidence that there are some forms of online social integration that can be just as beneficial and sort of a feasible replacement for traditional on-campus face-to-face integration. Now we haven't actually started working on this project yet despite the fact that it was awarded the end of last year. One being one of the reasons for this being that I decided to take up a position at ANU. So the grants on some currently on some mystical journey between the University of Newcastle and the Australian National University which is apparently going to take a few months. But I think the most pressing reason we haven't started the project and the thing that's really made us re-calibrate where we're going with it is COVID and sort of what that's done to campus culture and campus life for students. So as you'll know, most campuses closed at the start of the year or partially closed and a lot of them still haven't opened up depending on what country you're looking at. And so we're asking ourselves, will this campus culture, will this ability for students to connect face-to-face come back? And when it does, what's it going to look like? Are we going to have more online courses than we did before? And also is this going to be an equity issue? So who's going to be on campus and who's not? And is that going to particularly affect low SES students who are sort of the target of our intervention? And then I think probably the most, the thing that I really want to be able to capture with this project and definitely going to re-calibrate the project towards is that students have probably already found their own solutions during COVID. So they might have found things that work or things that don't work for them. And we really want to understand that and sort of work with what they've already been doing. So that's my time. But if anyone has any ideas about this or wants to talk more, you can always email me. Thanks, Olivia. Thanks to all of our speakers. We now have some time for a question and the questions that you might have for any of the individual speakers about their talks and areas of expertise. So we've got... I can see chat. Kristin, can you see raising hands and Q&A? I can't see raising hands, but that could also be because there's no hands raised. Oh, we have... Oh, I thought we had a hand raised. That's gone away. Oh, no, we do. Jun Wen. We can get Kali to unmute you and Jun Wen, we would love your question. Sorry, I'm not familiar with all these functions. So you just have a quick question to Olivia. It's a very interesting topic and I was wondering whether you have any data about international students specifically? That's actually a really good question, Jun Wen. Thank you. We haven't thought about international students specifically. The project is not going to be just based on Australia, so we're planning on recruiting from, like, a whole range of different countries, but I hadn't actually thought about including international students because I think they especially would already have ways of maintaining their bonds back home using social media, so they might have some interesting ways that they're creating new bonds as well using social media. Did you have any sort of particular thoughts about international students in this, like, sort of research? Not yet, but I have been thinking about these... in terms of, you know, how to help these students to adjust to their new environments when they come to Australia, for example. So I think probably some ideas could, I mean, be generated from what you have been doing. Maybe we could have a chat about that later on. Yes, definitely. I'd be happy to. I think that sounds very interesting. And yeah, I think international students are going to be one group that's particularly affected by whatever happens... what's happening now and whatever happens post-COVID in terms of campus life. So yeah, I definitely can catch up later. Yeah, great. So other questions that people might have? So what I thought as we went through these four speakers and saw, I guess, a diversity of topics all oriented to sort of complex sort of social issues and ones that are very relevant to sort of political challenges is potentially a sort of the emergence of a program in political psychology when you put together some of the constructs and the expertise and the commonalities across these sort of... these bodies of work. We not only see a strength in social psychology, but also very clear interests in political psychology. So that is something that we might be able to talk about into the future. I did have comments on each of the speakers, but they're questions that I can sort of follow up. But overall, I thought that they showcased, you know, where social psychology is heading, very real world, naturalistic type issues and orientations to trying to solve them. Are there any other questions that you can see, Kristen? I thought Erin might have had her hand up, but then it did. Oh, she's up. We can unmute Erin. I did sneak it up and then I put it back down. I just wanted to comment and say that was a really fascinating seminar and all of the talks were really interesting. And I suspect you'll all have many follow-up emails from different people. Zoe, I had a question for you. I'm sort of restricting myself because I had a bunch of questions for different people. But Zoe, I'm sort of curious about some of the data that you've got and the extent to which you think that exposure to information is driving some of your effects. Maybe that's something we can, like, sort of negotiate later and try and unpack a little bit. But I'm curious, as a cognitive psychologist, to think about the role of just simply familiarity of the information. Thanks for your question, Erin. In terms of the effects of things like misperceptions of what Australians think, I've had a little look at exposure to different types of information. So consumption of different types of media, for instance. The first thing to look at there is to see how much social media usage is driving misperceptions about where sentiment stands. But oddly enough, so I did, I looked at this a couple of years ago expecting to find this big effect for social media in distorting people's opinions about other people's sentiments. But social media wasn't the big scary bogeyman that you might expect. And actually it was consumption of newspapers and radio. So the old traditional forms, I guess, of where we get our news from was far more implicated in people misperceiving the norm. So I think it's very tempting to blame these new forms of social media. But from the added types of the data I've collected, it's these kind of false signalings spread across a range of media and news sources, I guess. That's great. That's really interesting though. I'll follow up with you and we can keep chatting. Very cool. That was great. Okay, Kristen, we're almost at time. Are there any other hands that you can see? No, I don't think we have any hands right now. So we may need to conclude our seminar for today. I will echo Erin and Kate's thoughts. I thought it was fascinating. It was so interesting. And thank you to all of you for the wonderful presentations that you put together. So we're really glad to have you all as our colleagues and look forward to the research that you keep producing in the next little while. We have another colleague who's also new, who's presenting next week, Dr. Connell Monahan. And he will be dazzling us with his research in what he described as a geeky area. So we're really looking forward to that. We thank everybody for joining us today. And we wish you a lovely lunchtime and rest of the week. So we'll see you then.