Beyond Conflict

Climate change presents significant challenges to coastal tourism, making adaptation essential to ensure resilience and sustainability. This study, conducted as part of the IMPETUS project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program, focuses on fostering climate-resilient tourism along the Catalan coast by transforming climate data into actionable information to support informed decision-making. Although tourism is not a priority sector under the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS), its dependency on climate variability and change highlights the urgent need for locally focused adaptation measures.  Using a participatory co-creation process with local stakeholders, we developed tailored climate indicators to assess the climate potential for tourism activities. Our work included identifying relevant datasets, computing robust indicators, and presenting the results through a user-friendly visualization tool. This tool empowers stakeholders to evaluate local climate risks and opportunities, enabling adaptive decision-making that aligns with regional needs and sector-specific challenges.  This study underscores the critical importance of addressing climate adaptation at a local scale, where the impacts of climate change are most directly felt and actionable solutions can be implemented effectively. It highlights how co-designed, user-oriented climate services can bridge gaps in global frameworks like the GFCS, offering scalable methodologies for climate-sensitive sectors such as tourism. By providing tools to integrate localized adaptation into planning, our work supports building resilient, sustainable tourism systems capable of navigating the complexities of a changing climate. 

In 16 independent samples from five countries involving ~7,700 participants, we employ a mixture of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and quasi-experimental methods to examine the effect of intergroup contact on (a) the blatant dehumanization of outgroups, and (b) the perception that outgroup members dehumanize the ingroup (meta-dehumanization). First, we conduct a meta-analysis across 12 survey samples collected from five countries regarding eight different target groups (total N = 5,388) and find a consistent effect of contact quality on dehumanization and meta-dehumanization. Second, we use a large longitudinal sample of American participants (N = 1,103) to show that quality of contact with Muslims at Time 1 predicts dehumanization of Muslims and meta-dehumanization 6 months later. Finally, we show that sustained semester-long "virtual contact" between American and Muslim college students is associated with reduced American students' (N = 487) dehumanization of, and perceived dehumanization by, Muslims.

American racism is alive and well. In this essay, we amass a large body of classic and contemporary research across multiple areas of psychology (e.g., cognitive, developmental, social), as well as the broader social sciences (e.g., sociology, communication studies, public policy), and humanities (e.g., critical race studies, history, philosophy), to outline seven factors that contribute to American racism: 1) Categories, which organize people into distinct groups by promoting essentialist and normative reasoning, 2) Factions, which trigger ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition and threat, 3) Segregation, which hardens racist perceptions, preferences, and beliefs through the denial of intergroup contact, 4) Hierarchy, which emboldens people to think, feel, and behave in racist ways, 5) Power, which legislates racism on both micro and macro levels, 6) Media, which legitimizes overrepresented and idealized representations of White Americans while marginalizing and minimizing people of color, and 7) Passivism, such that overlooking or denying the existence of racism obscures this reality, encouraging others to do the same and allowing racism to fester and persist. We argue that these and other factors support American racism, and conclude with suggestions for future research, particularly in the domain of identifying ways to promote anti-racism.

The Islamic State has lost much of its territory, leaving foreign fighters with few options. Specifically, they can choose to stay in a losing battle, move to a new theater of conflict, or return home. Those who choose to return home return to communities and structures that remain relatively unchanged since they left and return to watch regional conflicts—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine—simmer largely unresolved. In other words, the context and motivations that pushed thousands of fighters to take up arms and ideology with the Islamic State and other groups have not changed, and continue to be a source of frustration and potential radicalisation for thousands of new youth across the region. Grievances remain unaddressed, opportunities remain scarce, political change is slow or nonexistent, and millions of youth continue to feel excluded, hopeless, and marginalized even within their families and communities. Simply, neither the structural nor the psychological situation has improved in any meaningful way, maintaining the risk of extremism and violence across the region.

Although human societies provide protection from harm and enable the construction of collaborative and mutually beneficial social structures, they also pave the way for social hierarchies that deny equal treatment to certain portions of the population. Moral judgments about fairness and equality, as well as stereotypes, biases, and prejudice, emerge as early as 3 and 4 years of age. Investigating young children’s responses to the unfair treatment of others reveals that, beginning at 3–4 years of age, children often act on ingroup biases and do not yet challenge exclusion or rectify inequalities. By 5–6 years of age, however, children’s knowledge of groups, along with their understanding of others’ mental states, enables them to begin to critically evaluate unfair practices, particularly in peer contexts. These factors play a significant role in young children’s emerging ability to challenge unfair treatment of others.