E&D JUST PUBLISHED: UON Psychology-led Special Issue on Social Cohesion Research Published on the International Day for the Elimination of Racism

 

The Journal of Social Issue, the flagship journal of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (or SPSSI), the largest society of social scientists in the world, has just published a special issue on Advances in Intergroup contact research entitled: "Transforming Society with Intergroup Contact: Current Debates, State of the Science, and Pathways to Engaging with Social Cohesion Practitioners and Policy Makers". 

In 1954, social psychologist Gordon Allport hypothesised that contact between members of opposing groups reduces prejudice and conflict in the landmark book 'The Nature of Prejudice". The special issue showcasing research on the determinants, dynamics and consequences of intergroup contact reflects research presented by 50+ international social cohesion researchers at the Newcastle SPSSI-SASP conference in April 2019; this was led by A/Prof Stefania Paolini and the help of a tireless group of UON psychology staff and research students. 

This compilation of work was published to coincide with the 2021 International Day for the Elimination of Racism on the 21st of March and Australian Harmony week. Stefania has led this collaborative project together with seven other international leaders in the area and encouraging contributions from senior and junior researchers from 18 countries and 5 continents. 

The full issue of seven core articles and five position and commentary papers is available as open access here 

Including Stefania Paolini and colleagues' Introductory paper.  

This large collaborative project has offered an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of diversity in our scientific community. In the issue’s Preface, the contributors call for a scientific community free from harassment, abuse, and dominance. The special issue contributors have signed this statement and invite colleagues to do the same here. 

Finally, we dedicate this special issue to our colleague and friend Anja Eller, who left us far too early, and to Daphne Keats, who spearheaded intercultural studies in Australasia at a time in history when women were expected to stay quiet at home.

Stefania has talked about her efforts at increasing diversity in science and reflected on Australian Multiculturalism around Harmony Day with Kia Handley at ABC Mornings. Her radio segment is between the 47 and 57 minute of the recording here.

See also her interview for Aurora, the Catholic magazine of the Dioceses of Maitland and Newcastle for the same occasion here. 

To know more about Stefania's research visit her UON profile page or email her at stefania.paolini@newcastle.edu.au

Safeguarding wallabies against bushfires

 The Conservation Science Research Group and their grant partners at the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, have been granted Australian Research Council funding to determine how some of our most threatened wallabies cope with fire. Several PhD students will be studying parma wallabies, red-legged pademelons and other terrestrial marsupials.

 Australia’s catastrophic bushfires of 2019/2020 is estimated to have killed or displaced nearly three billion animals. Climate change is expected to make fires more frequent and more intense. Australia already leads the world in mammalian extinctions, with over 30 species extinct in the past 250 years, and these fires pose a significant threat to over one hundred more.

 The Conservation Science Research Group is a group of interdisciplinary scientists working on all facets of science relevant to conserving our natural environment for future generations. The group includes ecologists, psychologists, zoologists, behavioural ecologists, artists, engineers, lawyers and philosophers.

The group, including Dr Andrea Griffin from the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle, will be comparing populations in fire-affected areas and fire non-affected areas and asking questions about wallaby distribution, behaviour, foods and stress. The researchers will be recommending where to build corridors so that populations fragmented by habitat destruction can be reconnected. 

SOPRG APPOINTMENT: With Hayley Cullen’s research in Forensic psychology UON Psychology opens up a new Bachelor of Criminology

 If a violent and serious crime occurred right in front of your very eyes, do you think you would see it? Do you think you would have seen the assault in the image below? I suspect your answer would be “duh, of course!”. 

 

What about if you were focusing your attention on something else? On your phone, perhaps? Doing some chores? Watching your child?

We often believe that what we see when we open our eyes is a complete picture of all that is out there in the world. But unfortunately, purely looking does not mean that we see everything. In fact, evidence suggests that when we are focusing our attention on something else, it is quite possible that we might not notice something incredibly obvious and serious happening right in front of us, even something like a violent crime. 

This experience is called “inattentional blindness”. If you are not yet familiar with the term, see if this video jogs your memory

Our legal system relies quite heavily on the information that witnesses to crimes provide. This might be the only form of evidence available to tie an offender to the event. So if potential witnesses are not expecting a crime to happen, and are focused on something else at the time, could they fail to notice that crime? And what impact does failing to notice a crime happening have on the type of information witnesses provide?

These two questions were the focus of the PhD research of Hayley Cullen, UON Psychology’s new member of staff with expertise in Forensic Psychology. 

Hayley explains: “In some fun experiments, we had naïve participants watch a video, such as that above, where they were given a specific counting task to complete (“How many times did the football teams drop the ball?). Unbeknownst to our participants, about midday through the video, an individual walked right through the middle of the ball game with a weapon, towards a bystander on the side, and assaulted this bystander. 

Well, close to three quarters of all of our participants did not see this violent assault at all. Interestingly, we also found that while the amount of detail these witnesses provided was reduced compared to witnesses who saw the crime, these witnesses were still able to provide some accurate details that would be important for the criminal investigation (such as a description of the bystanders)”. 

So, it seemed as if failing to notice a crime affected the quantity of information witnesses provided, but not necessarily the quality. However, in a similar study using a different video, we found that failing to notice the crime did actually reduce the accuracy (and therefore quality) of witnesses’ memories. Hayley also found that after providing these participants with misleading, incorrect information about the crime, witnesses who did not see the crime were more likely to report these incorrect details in their memory accounts.

What does this all mean? For one, these findings tell us that despite what we might initially believe, serious crimes can go unnoticed by bystanders when their attention is focused on something else. And failing to notice crimes when they occur can have some pretty serious consequences for the quality of the witness’ testimony. Police officers who are given the task of interviewing these witnesses should bear this in mind when taking statements, so that they do not put pressure on these witnesses to provide inaccurate information about events they have not seen. 

Hayley will be contributing with her research and her teaching to the newly established Bachelor of Criminology/Bachelor of Psychological Science at UON.

To know more about Hayley Cullen’s research on forensic psychology: Hayley.Cullen@newcastle.edu.au

E&D NEWS: Dr Subasic at UON Psychology helps us celebrate IWD2021 and reminds us of the long way to go

 Each year the 8th of March provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress women have made towards equality, to celebrate those who have led the way and to unite behind a commitment to continue to pursue meaningful change.

This year's United Nations' theme is 'Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world'.

This theme juxtaposes the pivotal role women have played in effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet women continue to be significantly under-represented in parliaments and C-suites. In September last year, our University became a signatory to the tertiary education sector’s Joint Statement on ‘Preserving Gender Equity as a Higher Education Priority During and After COVID-19’. This statement highlighted that without conscious action to address the gendered impacts of COVID-19, the pandemic threatens to derail the tertiary education sector’s decades-long effort to advance gender equity.

Today Dr Emina Subasic, social psychologist and senior lecturer within UON Psychology, help our University community and the broader public reflect on the significance of this day with a public talk at the UON Gallery, Callaghan Campus.

Emina was interviewed this week by the Newcastle Herald. Her article titles: Why Change Must Be More Than Tokenism

Dr Emina Subasic believes it will take time, money and resources to achieve gender equality. But she said not doing anything will cost more. 

"We should budget for belonging with the same fervour with which we budget for buildings," said Dr Subasic.

"Change is costly. We need to treat this as an issue that is going to require creating positions and funding - in my sector early women researchers - and looking at strategies to provide support for women coming back from maternity leave, looking at quotas in terms of appointments. I know these are very polarising issues, but I think we have spent a decade now thinking we can just tweak things, we can train women to be better negotiators, we can train them in assertiveness, we can train them to find and work with mentors, but all of these strategies signal that it is a women's problem, which is not the case and they also try and fix the problem by fixing women.

"Gender equality is not a women's problem, this is a common cause for women and men and everyone else in society to come together and solve together. It's a “we for she”, it's not a “she for she”, or a “he for she".

Dr Subasic said change would not be easy, or cheap. "But budgeting for change and budgeting for equality has huge benefits in terms of creating a sense that we all belong," she said. "Organisations where there is the sense that we all belong are organisations that can fully capitalise on the talent and creativity and innovation and energy and also be organisations where people see themselves and feel they're a part of - and that's priceless."

Dr Subasic spoke to UON staff on yesterday  which was International Women's Day [IWD]. The theme of this year's event is Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world. UON's School of Humanities and Social Science also hosted a public panel discussion on the making of modern leaders. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard cited Dr Subasic in her book “Women and Leadership, Real Lives, Real Lessons”. Dr Subasic arrived in Australia as a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1997 and is now a social change and leadership scholar.

"I think we recognise that inequality is no longer sort of explainable by things like caring responsibilities, but part and parcel of inequality is discrimination against women and sexism that's embedded in our society in all kinds of ways," she said.

"I think there is a lot more agreement now that inequality is unjust and that change is needed. Where we get a little bit stuck and where it's tricky is finding some good clear direction for how that change can take place. Some of the ways in which we've attempted to create change may not be as effective as we'd hoped they would be and we might need to rethink those strategies for change."

Dr Subasic said research had shown that stereotypes that equated science with men started to disappear with greater numbers of women in science. "When we have a more equal society, that will just take care of prejudice and bias itself. Effective strategies for bias reduction are creating equal societies, not the other way around." Current strategies that addressed unconscious bias and targeted women, she said, were responding to a system that is still broken.

"Do we want to remove those programs? No, but we also want to rethink their role and we want to supplement those programs with genuine commitment to change."

Dr Subasic said it was important to think of change not as the absence of inequality, or something that happened automatically when barriers to equality were removed. "Change is a process in its own right," she said. "It's something we come together and strategise about and actively are mobilised for."

Dr Subasic said men's involvement in IWD needed to move beyond the tokenistic and symbolic and include genuine engagement.

Emina’s public talk at UON Gallery and at the presence of the University VC, staff and community member clearly stroke the target:  Prof Alex Zelinsky’s, UON VC message to the whole staff following her public talk echoed Dr Subasic’s message very clearly when he stated: 

“We’ve done a lot in the equity space to speed up our progress to equality. But it has been driven home to us all in the most confronting of ways these past few weeks, that it’s time to shift our focus onto men – who will help determine what the future looks like for people of all genders.  

We often hear in discussions about gender equality that young women can’t be what they can’t see. Equally, young men can’t be what they can’t see – so it’s time to think about the behaviour we are modelling to the next generation we teach, share a meeting or dinner table with. As a University, I believe we have a civic responsibility to help facilitate meaningful conversations about things that matter. Achieving gender equality is a shared responsibility.”

The full content of Dr Subasic’s Newcastle Herald interview can be found here: 

For the last ABS and WGFA report on the gender gap in Australia see here:

To know more about Dr Emina Subasic research see her UON profile or email her at: Emina.Subasic@Newcastle.edu.au