With its high mortality rate, severe restrictions, and heavy economic losses, the COVID-19 pandemic has evoked major threat perceptions that have nurtured violence, ethnocentrism, extremism, and prejudice against minority group members. Yet, reactions to the threat of COVID-19 have been manifold. Not every individual and not every society have reacted with heightened prejudice against minority group members. My research project tackles this issue. By combining prominent social-psychological (i.e., Social Identity Theory and Integrated Threat Theory) and evolutionary approaches (i.e., Pathogen Avoidance Model), my research aims to understand the psychological and socio-cultural conditions that help to reduce prejudice against refugees while simultaneously promoting the well-being of young adults. The knowledge gained from this project will not only be relevant for the challenges we face in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic but will also equip scientists and policy-makers with strategies to better manage future global upheavals, for instance, in relation to the effects of climate change on our globalized economies and the dynamics of scarcity.
Arzu Karakulak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Bahcesehir University. In 2015, she obtained a joint PhD from Tilburg University (the Netherlands) and Koc University (Turkey) in the domain of Social, Industrial-Organizational and Cross-Cultural Psychology. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a psychologist in Germany, where she also obtained her master’s degree in Psychology from the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen. She is a Turkish-German scholar with research interests in the cross-cultural comparative study of antecedents and outcomes of prosocial behavior including volunteering and the functions of various forms of social identity (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) for the well-being and acculturation of minority youth. Additionally, she is interested in studying the universal and cultural-specific precursors of moral decision-making and leadership emergence. Her research has been published in high impact peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Personality and Individual Differences, and the Journal of Adolescence. She is an affiliated academician at the Bahcesehir University Center for Migration and Urban Studies (BAUMUS) and the Koc University Leadership Lab.
